


Without Balance There Is No... ?

by anthropomorph7



Series: Without Balance There Is No... [1]
Category: Balan Wonderworld (Video Game), NiGHTS into Dreams, ナイツ 〜星降る夜の物語〜 | NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:40:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26340535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropomorph7/pseuds/anthropomorph7
Summary: Pose is a juxtapose - like Balan and Lance. Her talent is writing. Or, well, it was. She has writers block and is hitting depression hard because of it. Apparently the rest of the theater crew (16 juxtapose characters and a multitude of animated costumes, props, etc) have tried to assist, but Pose needs more help than she's willing to admit. [Director] Balan can't have a writer who can't write, so he sends her into Wonderworld to find what she's lost - part of herself. It strains the theater's reserve of magic, though, which means things could go wrong both in and out of Wonderworld. Can Pose get back home before negative energy throws off the balance and threatens to destroy the theater?
Series: Without Balance There Is No... [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914052
Kudos: 14





	1. Without Balance There Is No... Peace?

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 1 – “ …Peace?”**

The crew had gone through one of their wild parties again last evening. The remnants were everywhere –crumbs, wrappers, bits of spilled drinks, melted ice cream drippings, stray confetti, a few streamers… The list went on. The auditorium was a wreck. And the janitor was busy sleeping off the night full of singing and dancing with the rest of them.

Pose sat at the A/V table in the back, staring at the mess on stage. It was the worst up there. Some of the scenery had been redecorated, and then damaged. A piece of curtain had been torn. It might be beyond mending this time – they might just need to replace the stage curtains finally. Maybe if there was a large enough ladder out to get them down, it would be an excuse to finally assign a team to removing the cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling and polish the fixtures. There was so little traffic these days, there was hardly a need.

She sighed. The traffic – or lack thereof – was really at the core of her frustrations. There was a great big world out there, full of people! People had lives full of trouble and doubt, joy and laughter, so why weren’t they coming in? Surely someone needed the theater and all of the distractions it could provide, even in this modern age, she thought.

And yet, the company had hardly seen anyone in what felt like forever. The crew had gone without practice for so long that Pose wasn’t even sure they still knew how to do their jobs. It wasn’t like anyone made them regularly run the mockups anymore. Maybe she should take a break from writing and go down to straighten them out – no one else was going to.

That made her bristle. Someone else should have been playing the grown-up so she didn’t have to. It wasn’t her job to wrangle the crew like they were kids who needed to be reminded to clean their rooms – that was the stage manager’s job!

Jovial whistling drew her gaze down to the doors that went from the side hall to the area between the stage and the front rows. Balan was just coming in, tugging a huge trashcan on wheels with a broom, dustbin, and mop sticking out of it.

Pose frowned. What good was a mop without a mop bucket? Why had he even brought it? Why not have left the mop _with_ the mop bucket for after the dry trash was cleaned up? He never made any sense.

There he went, sweeping away down front while whistling some old and happy tune – like a senile old man, with a hat brim for a mustache, lost in dreams of his glory days.

Pose let her head thud on the desk in front of her. Of all the people to be up at this hour and working, why was it the annoyingly happy one? Where was Lance? He was responsible sometimes. Or Iativ? He could be just as annoying as Balan, but at least he knew how to work without playing. Inc was missing, too, and she was usually the first one up. Unless she was busy doing inventory in the kitchen. After last night’s ruckus, they would probably have to restock everything.

She shook her head. This wasn’t getting her work done any faster. If she wanted to finish and relax, Pose told herself, she would have to stop worrying about what everyone else _wasn’t_ doing, and focus on what she _could_ be doing.

. . . which was writing.

. . . which she hadn’t been able to do for weeks.

Oh, she’d tried. She’d sat here, hidden away in the back of the theater, looking for inspiration from the antics of the others. She’d gone and sat up in the catwalks and jotted ideas. She’d hung out in the green room, the kitchen, the basement, the dressing room’s closets full of costumes, she’d even sat up on the roof several times, listening to the music of dreams. But none of those ideas had gone anywhere. Nothing was as grand as things had been in the past. Back then, it had seemed like ideas just blossomed whenever she sat down to write, but these days it was like squeezing the last drop of juice from a piece of fruit.

 _Maybe it’s time to hire a new writer?_ she wondered to herself, tapping her pencil on her beloved, old-and-beat-up notepad. _Maybe a new writer with fresh eyes, fresh ears, and fresh thoughts on the world. Maybe then traffic would come back._

“Wow! You’ve been busy!”

Pose jumped and scrambled to cover her crossed off lines of scribble with her arms.

That pompous bastard was peering over her shoulder and grinning like he always did. En _tirely_ too happy. Always.

“Don’t you have anything better to do than interrupt me?” Pose growled.

Balan raised his brows, humor in his eyes. “You seemed like you wanted company.”

“If I wanted company, I wouldn’t be hanging out in the A/V area where it’s supposed to _be quiet!_ ”

The director looked around, as though checking to see if he’d disturbed other people. It was a moot point, since the theater was completely empty.

“Where’s Purr?” he asked. “I haven’t seen her darling antics in a while.”

“I don’t know! I’m not her keeper! She’s probably out front pasting cupcakes all over the foyer or something.”

Balan hummed. “I hope she uses real ones. That sounds delicious.”

Pose roller her eyes, scoffed, and pulled her writing tablet onto her lap, facedown. “Do you need something, or can you go away?”

He leaned back against the table and crossed his arms in a relaxed way. “Nope and nope. I just felt the need to see your smiling face.” He grinned again. Evidently, he just enjoyed being annoying.

“I’ll smile when you leave,” Pose grumbled.

Balan laughed properly. It was weird, because he didn’t laugh properly all that often. He usually affected a showman’s laugh. An honest laugh from him was rare these days. Probably, most of the rest of the crew had forgotten what it sounded like. It tugged at something Pose felt like she’d forgotten, but she quickly shoved it aside – more embarrassed at having been caught feeling sorry for herself.

“Fine, _I’ll_ leave. I have better things to do than write about messes left by roustabouts and their careless caretaker.”

“Oh, that hurt.” He threw an arm over his face and clutched at his chest like he was in pain. “How ever shall my caretaking proceed when I’ve been injured so?”

Pose was not impressed. Nor was she willing to engage. She was already tromping away down the side aisle. Maybe she could find somewhere else to hide and contemplate life and the writing of it.

“Oh, now, don’t be so boring,” Balan called, taking a few quick steps to catch up. “Where did you say Purr was, again?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”

“That’s odd.” The director held a finger to his chin, again over-dramatizing his actions. “I haven’t seen her in a while, either. I hope she’s okay.”

“Who cares?” Pose growled. “She’s an airhead. Nothing she does ever helps. All it does is cause a spectacle and rile up the others. And for that matter,” she rounded on Balan, “That’s all _you_ do, as well! Why are you busy asking me about Purr? Where’s Lance? Did you come bother me so you could hide from him yelling at you for letting everyone else stay up late? Very responsible of you. What if we had guests walk in right now? Or someone looking to tryout for a part? What kind of impression would they get from this?!” She threw a hand out wide to the debris-strewn theater. “You aren’t helping any more than Purr does!”

The smile never slipped from Balan’s face, but his eyes betrayed a hint of sadness. “I think you need a break. You’ve been trying awfully hard, lately. It seems to be stressing you out.” Then his eyes relaxed and the jovial air returned. “How about if I go fix a fancy brunch and we can discuss some ideas for the next-”

“ _Don’t you try to write for ME!_ ” Pose shouted. “You’ve got your own problems to worry about, so stop trying to avoid them by worrying about mine!”

She turned and started stomping down toward the other lower entrance.

For a moment, Balan didn’t move or respond. He just stood there, watching.

When Pose hit the doors, she shouldered into the first one and rebounded back. Odd… It wasn’t usually locked. She gave the other door a shove. It wouldn’t open either, much to her frustration. (It never occurred to her that they had only _just_ locked, a tick before she reached them.) She gave a loud growl at the doors and started up the side stairs which lead to the stage. She would go out the back.

“Pose…” Balan called.

She paused briefly and glanced back to see what he wanted. The grin was still there, and that bugged her. But she couldn’t deny there was something like sympathy or pity in those eyes, and that was even more infuriating.

“You need help. Where’s Purr?”

“RRRGH!” Pose gave up and threw her notepad in Balan’s direction, then turned to continue off the back of the stage.

Balan came out from behind a torn curtain in front of her and blocked the path.

“Hey! No using magic you don’t need unless there’s a good reason!” Pose put her hands on her hips. “Teleporting wastes an awful lot!”

“You’re not listening. You need help. Where’s Purr?” Her notebook was shoved in his pocket and sticking out slightly.

“No, _you’re_ not listening! I. Don’t. Know!”

She started to shove past him, but he snagged her elbows and brought her back out into the lights on the main stage. Apparently, whatever point he felt needed making hadn’t been clear enough.

“ _No one_ has seen her recently, Pose. Why is that?”

“I don’t know!” she said, annoyed.

“I think you do,” he said, tipping his head down to look her in the face. With his performance shoes and fancy hat, Balan was taller than most everyone else in the crew.

Purr was one of the only exceptions, but that was because she wore huge, platformed heels and had more hair than the 80s. Pose, forever the dull shadow of Purr’s existence, was much shorter, and dressed much more modestly – in a pinstriped business suit befitting a woman in the work place – at least as far as she was concerned. She refused to look Balan in the eye and be met with that pity, though.

“Hey,” he tried again.

“I don’t know where she is. She’s just… missing. It happens sometimes. You should know.”

Balan let go and stood back up. “So, you _do_ know you need help.”

“I don’t _need help_ ,” she muttered. “I just … need more time. I’ll get a good script we can work with, soon.”

“You said it yourself, ‘No using magic you don’t need unless there’s a good reason.’ You haven’t turned out a workable manuscript in months, Pose. And now Purr’s gone missing. If you’re going to hold yourself together, you need help. You _are_ a good reason. Let me help.”

“ _I can do this myself!_ ” This time she _did_ look up at him, but in an angry glare. “I don’t _need_ your help!”

The world felt wrong. A wave of dizziness hit Pose. She hadn’t felt that way in years. It was what used to happen when…

She turned on her heel to march away, but found a subway car’s open doors in front of her. It startled her back. She spun around, trying to locate the stage. She had to ground herself before the rest of the magic took hold of her senses and she was whisked away to somewhere else. But the wooden stage floor was gone. The bright lights were gone, replaced by the dim lighting of a subway station. It was the last place she’d seen on _the outside_ , before the theater had consumed her life magic.

Only Balan was still there. He didn’t belong in a subway. He belonged in a theater. It was wrong.

“Go home,” Pose said, surprised by the sadness in her own voice. “Leave me alone.”

The height difference was very wrong. He leaned down and patted her cheek like she was suddenly no taller than a child.

_Did I shrink? Oh no, he really went all-out if my age altered. There won’t be anything left to-_

“Come back soon,” Balan said. For a moment, the stage-smile faltered and there was real sadness in his eyes. “It’s no fun being alone, Cleo.”

The doors slammed shut, and the world outside the car was dark.

Pose fell back on her bottom, dizzy and confused. The subway rumbled on and went into a turn, leaving the theater and its pain-in-the-neck director behind. She laid back on the floor as the turn swung the other direction, snaking away to someplace else – someplace buried. She wasn’t sure where – it was too dark. Someplace where she would need the name _Cleo_ , she supposed. Who was _Cleo_ , though? She could hardly remember. It felt like someone who she’d said goodbye to long ago, but why?

“There’s too much. I can’t think. Where’s Purr? Why is Balan acting weirder than normal? Why wasn’t anyone else up, yet? How much magic is this going to cost? Why can’t I write? Something’s just… I can’t do this!”

She wrapped her arms over her face and cried, lying on the floor in the moving subway car.


	2. Without Balance There Is No... Direction?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pose, a "juxtapose" like Balan and Lance, finds herself on a "train of thought" into Wonderworld, where she encounters a carnival full of extras. At least, that's what she thinks they are, until one of them attempts to befriend her. Is it possible someone dug up her own memories and fished out pieces of them that could help her get home?  
> ((Sorry, short chapter! Look for a new one tomorrow.))

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 2 – “ …Direction?”**

_Am I asleep? Did I tire myself out crying that much?_

Pose rolled over and tried to pull her covers back up over her cold shoulders. But there were no covers, and the hard floor of the subway car was definitely no substitute for a pillow.

When she rolled, there was a light clatter. Her notebook had fallen off of her stomach and onto the floor. She blinked at it.

“I threw this away, though.”

She picked it up and looked it over. All of her crossed off writing ideas were still at the top of the first page, and her pencil was still clipped into the spirals, but now there was a line of loopy writing under hers.

 _‘What do you need?_ ’

Pose’s head started to ache. “Oh, what, so even when you send me away, you’re going to still remind me that I’m pitiable? Thanks a lot, jerk.”

She stood, brushed herself off, and took account of what had changed with her appearance. She seemed to have reverted in age and height to about that of a young tween. Beyond that, she couldn’t quite place her precise age, and she couldn’t remember when she had liked the style of clothing she now wore. (If ever it had appealed to her at all.)

“Capris? Ugh! Unprofessional. High-tops? What antiques shop did these things walk out of? And this blouse-and-vest combo makes me look like an introverted little book-worm!”

She shoved the notebook in the back pocket of her pants and quickly cuffed the sleeves of her shirt to a manageable length. Then a thought struck her and she whipped out the notebook again. She scribbled under Balan’s annoying taunt with her own.

“ _A better wardrobe designer, for one thing! How am I supposed to do anything in this get-up?!_ ”

Pose chuckled to herself. The comment obviously wouldn’t make its way back to the maestro, but the thought of retorting to that smug face of his was enough to at least bring her a few feel-goods.

“Right. Compose yourself, self!”

She looked at her reflection in the dirty glass of the subway windows and fixed her hair. It was a mess – almost as poufy as Purr’s, now. She would have to find some way to tie it back later. Then she moved on to wiping off her face and checking how puffy her cheeks were. If she wasn’t careful, it would show that she’d been crying. Nothing could be worse than that.

Something outside caught her attention. Lights along the top of the wall of the tunnel were starting to become distinguishable from one another – the train was slowing down. She took hold of one of the upright posts and waited for it to come to a stop at another dimly lit station.

The tiles at the new stop were all tinted cherry-ish pink, and the concrete was a disgusting shade of orange. Clearly this was no place in the real world. It had to be in Wonderworld, somewhere. But it was _busy_! People by the dozen were coming and going up and down the main stairwell to the station as Pose watched the slow, final approach.

When the doors opened to let her off, a flood of people went inside. She turned to watch with curiosity, but it seemed like the people vanished into thin air as soon as they crossed the threshold of the subway car.

Pose shivered and headed for the stairs, trying not to think what kind of people these must be.

“Maybe they’re not even real at all,” crossed her mind.

Her head hurt. Her steps slowed. People bumped and jostled her as they went past. They obviously had places to be, whether they were real or not. None of them appeared to feel the weight of existence as heavily as Pose did.

Steam calliope music drifted down from the top of the stairs, and a smell of fried sugar.

“Oh, wow, that takes me back,” she groaned.

The top of the stairs opened onto fair grounds at night. They were alight with neon and incandescent lights. The music seemed to come from everywhere, and yet nowhere. And the crowds up here were worse than in the subway.

Pose turned and looked up at the entranceway. From here, the subway was marked as being a unique theme-park ride and not a real train. She mentally took note in case she had to come back this way later.

In truth, she had no idea where she was going or what she was doing. Using magic on other crew members wasn’t normally allowed. When it was, the extent was small scale compared this kind of a complete submersion. Wherever Balan had sent her, he didn’t give her a heads-up as to what she was doing there or how to get home.

With a sigh, she said to herself, “Maybe these are your walking papers, luv. You said they ought to consider hiring a new writer, after all.”

A duo of tiny tots with balloons laughed and ran past her. An enamored duo of older teenagers went by the other direction, sharing a cotton candy. A man in brightly striped clothing called out from nearby for people to test their strength with a mallet.

“Why am I here, even? There are so many better places I could have been dropped, if they were just going to drop me. I hate masses of stupid people. No one here gets it.”

A blurt of laughter made her turn around.

“Wow! How optimistic!”

A boy about her own age and height was there. His skater-shorts were almost the match length for her capris, and he wore them with a loose A-shirt and too-small looking denim jacket. His greasy mop of hair was entirely too long.

Pose put a hand on one hip. “Forgive me if overindulgence doesn’t charm me.”

“You need to relax, babe,” he said, holding his hands up in defense. “You sound like my mom.”

“And you sound like a punk.” Pose turned and started away.

Skater-boy caught up with her. “Your parents drop you off on your own to have a night out like the big kids so they could go on a date, or something?”

Pose’s upper lip twitched, but then she reconsidered the free excuse. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Sucks, right? Mine are back in the city. They dropped me here for the whole summer. The clowns got mad at me skating through the park after the first day or two, though, so I had to leave my blades back at Gram’s place.”

Pose wondered if there was someplace around where she could acquire a drink and use the ice to kill the headache. Then she realized she had no local money.

“UGH!” She whipped out her notebook and scribbled, _AND FUNDING!!!_

“Funding? You forget your wallet?”

Pose’s face went bright red and she quickly shoved her paper pad back in her pocket. “Maybe. It’s not your business.”

Skater boy grinned. “Whatcha want, babe? I’m bored. Consider it my way of paying for your company to keep me entertained until our rides pick us up.”

Her shoulders slouched. There likely wouldn’t _be_ a ride coming to pick her up. “I’m not all that interesting, I’m afraid. And I was just hoping for some hydration. I’m parched.”

“You talk funny. You from one of those fancy, private schools?” He nodded his head off to one side of the path they were walking and then cut slightly in front of Pose to get her to turn. He’d found a food vendor.

“Yeah… very private…” Pose said absently.

Skater boy ordered them soft drinks, then they were on their way into the fog of people again.

“Private school’s not the best school, huh?”

“I’m just…” Pose tried to choose her words carefully. “Not doing so well with it, is all. I can’t seem to succeed.”

“Well, I know how that goes. I’m barely getting by in my classes. Half of it is I don’t want to, though. So, there’s that.”

Pose frowned at him. “You don’t want to succeed?”

“Well, not at school,” he shrugged. “I want to be a professional athlete. Hockey’s the way I want to go. Now put me on the asphalt, or on the ice, and my success rate goes _way_ up.”

“Ah,” Pose said, losing interest again.

“What’s your name, by the way?”

Cold shot through her. Was this kid really just a mindless creation of Wonderworld, or was he another person who got stuck here before her? Maybe this was just a dream and not Wonderworld at all? _Okay, self, think… think… think…_

“Cleo,” she said, finally.

“Huh. Cute. Nice to meet you, Cleo the Private Student,” he teased. “I’m Emery.” He backed up a step and gave a dramatic bow.

Pose’s world seemed frozen for a moment. She knew that motion, didn’t she?

But then reality returned and sucked her along with it.

“Maybe another night we can meet up outside the park and I can show you some of my moves.” He spun a circle and did some fancy footwork like he was mock-skating, then struck a stupid pose.

Pose couldn’t help herself – she laughed, and her hand flew to cover her mouth and the indignity.

“ _There’s_ a smile! I knew ya had one in there! Hey, you ever try a mirror maze?”

Pose’s brows went up. “I can’t say that I recall…”

“The one here’s pretty good. It costs extra, but since you’re my entertainment for the night, I’ll treat. I think you’ll like it. Come on,” he motioned for them to head off down one of the carnival’s side pathways and started away.

Pose exhaled. “Alright, _maybe_ it’s not the worst place in the world to be dropped. Maybe.”


	3. Without Balance There Is No... Certainty?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pose and skater-boy Emery visit the carnival's house of mirrors. Discussions of goals and fears go on, challenging Pose to remember something she has forgotten since starting work at the theater. And then some of the natural predators of Wonderworld show up, feeling the presence of too much negativity in Pose.

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 3 – “ …Certainty?”**

A girl who looked college-aged took their money and briefed them on the rules for playing, then opened a door to the side of the entryway and allowed them passage into the house of mirrors. When it shut behind them, it appeared that the hallway went on forever. Around them, various reflections of themselves, or of empty doorways stared back.

“Well,” Pose said, “ _This_ is a spectacle.”

“Rad, right?” Skater boy grinned.

Pose’s lip curled a little. “Do people really come here to have fun? It seems unnecessarily over-the-top.”

“I _love_ these kinds of places! It’s not just a straight up path through here, either. There are dummy paths that have split-off dummy paths, and there’s tons of places that get you all spun around, making it harder to figure out where you are and if you’ve been there before.”

Pose couldn’t contain her confusion. “And that’s _appealing_?”

Emery sighed. “Here, _you_ lead. Go ’head. You’ll see.”

Pose strode forward purposefully. Then she slowed and came to a gradual halt as she realized she was walking toward a reflection of herself. Or… toward a reflection of some tween named Cleo.

Behind her, Emery chuckled.

To one side was a diagonal mirror, but the other way appeared to be an open doorway, though it had the same frame as every mirror in the facility. Pose turned that way.

Several twists and turns later, her face was red with embarrassment about having almost walked into a mirror twice, and at all the laughter her companion was having at her expense.

“Perhaps the entertainment portion of this is in being the spectator?” she sighed.

“Calm down, Miss Priss,” Emery said. “You’re doing good. Keep trying. The harder it is now, the more it means when you beat it.”

Pose had already started on another pathway, but the odd statement of truth gave her pause. The poor boy probably wasn’t even aware of the universal truth he’d stated. She glanced sideways down another hall of reflections. At the far end was a reflection of herself as she _ought_ to look – taller, older, professional, responsible.

“What do you think you’ll actually be when you grow up?” she asked Emery.

“A hockey player, duh!” he laughed, snagging her by the elbow and kept moving on down a different path.

“Well, I know that’s what you said you _want_ to be, but what do you actually foresee yourself becoming?”

Emery stopped and turned a blank look to her. After a moment he said, “Why would I try to be something besides what I want to be?”

Pose sighed. “Well, not that you would _try_ to be something you didn’t want to be, but… What say there’s no room on a hockey team for a new player when you reach a point in your life where you need a job? Or what if you sustain an accident that renders you unable to ever play again? Won’t you at some point need a day-job? A backup-plan? Something else you’re _okay_ at, even if it’s not your favorite thing?”

The blank stare remained, but behind Emery, something in the reflection was moving. Pose turned around back to check if more people had come in, but they were alone.

“Why plan for every eventuality? Better to just adapt to the situation as it arises.” He started off again.

Pose lost track of the stray movement and quickened her pace to keep up. “Hey, um… Do you ever…”

Emery rounded a corner and held a finger up for her to hold still one moment.

“… like, get freaked out in places like this?” she finished, double checking all of the surrounding reflections for signs of whatever that movement had been.

Emery emerged from his pathway about four mirror-frames down. “Rats. If this circle-offshoot is right after a turn, that means we’re near the back of the building in the far corner, which means we’re _way_ off the beaten path.”

It was out of the corner of her eye; Pose was sure she saw something. She spun around and tried to take in everything in all the mirrors at once. All she could see were reflections of her ugly tween-self and Emery, considering his directions – which looked multifaceted from this spot.

“This place doesn’t creep you out at all?” Pose asked, taking one nervous step back toward her companion.

“Nah, I’ve been through it enough times with enough people it doesn’t bug me out,” he said. “I hate to admit defeat, but I had hoped it would make you laugh and feel better about being dumped off here.”

Pose turned around to see an apologetic half-smile on Emery’s face. He’d really been trying.

“What _does_ make you afraid?” she asked, curiously and cautiously, getting an inkling of what might be happening.

“Oh…” Emery motioned for her to follow and set off down another path. “I read a book by this dude called Lovecraft, once. Creepy monsters like you couldn’t imagine. Everyone either went crazy or got eaten.”

Pose winced. “That sounds awful.”

“Yeah. Don’t think I’ll be going out as Cthulhu for Halloween anytime soon.”

“Cth- … what?” Pose paused at a fork. “Hang on,” she said.

Emery had started down one path, but down the other path, staring back at Pose was her proper reflection, again. Maybe turning away from it before to take a different path was what had gotten them lost.

“Let’s go this way, instead.”

Emery shrugged and came back. He didn’t seem to notice that the reflection of ‘Cleo’ in front of them was different. Maybe only she could see it.

“Cthulhu’s a big, ugly, tentacle-dragon-monster of ancient evil, is the nutshell version.”

“That’s off-putting,” Pose said, absently, trying to think where she’d seen something similar before. The description sounded vaguely familiar and definitely brought the fear-vibe with it. She just couldn’t remember why.

“Oh hey, I think I know where we are!” Emery said. “We’re not far from the main path.” He stopped and held a hand out in front of them – an ‘ _After you,_ ’ gesture. “Wanna take over?”

Pose gave one last look over her shoulder for movement or strange reflections, “Okay. If it gets us out of here faster. I don’t care for the unknown and this place is freaking me out.”

“It’s just a funhouse,” Emery said, trying to be reassuring. “Why’d you start talking about fears, anyway? What scares _you_? Mirrors?”

“Not particularly, no,” Pose said, catching a glimpse of herself again and making a turn. “Becoming what I hate is what scares me.”

“Which would be?”

Pose stopped short. Directly ahead of them was the exit door – a mirror frame but without a reflective surface. Instead it was just painted matte black. But on either side of it were slightly angled mirrors. In one, her reflection was the way she ought to look. In the other, was Purr. She didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t seen Purr in so long! How did she end up in a funhouse mirror?

“Cleo?”

Emery derailed her train of thought and she jumped. The images were gone. Had she just imagined things?

“What is it you hate, that you’re afraid of becoming?”

Pose blinked. “I . . . don’t remember.” She reached out a hand to the exit door’s handle. “But I have a feeling I’m going to need to face it, sooner or later.”

As she pulled the door open, every mirror in the attraction shattered. Roars rolled through the facility.

Pose grabbed Emery by the wrist and hurried out into the night. “Let’s move!”


	4. Without Balance There Is No... Magic?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the run from some "rejections", Pose confides in Emery what she really is. In trying to make a run for it, she loses her precious writers' notebook full of notes from the theater. But that's not the worst thing...

“Without Balance There Is No…”  
Chapter 4 – “…Magic?”

“What in the world was that?!” Emery shouted as they bolted through the carnival’s crowd.  
“Less asking, more running!” Pose called over her shoulder, still dragging her companion along by the wrist.  
Behind them, multiple beasties like large dogs made out of shards of glass broke down the exit of the funhouse and paused, growling, to take in the new setting.  
“And what are those things?”  
Pose chanced a glance back. “Nothing good. They’re called rejections.”  
“D’you mean ‘reflections’? They look like they’re made from those mirrors.”  
“No,” Pose ducked past some civilians and hurried them down a different path, out of the line of sight of the beasties. “They check your reflection for rejections, and then they enable them.”  
“What?!” Emery asked, thoroughly confused.  
“Look, I’ll explain in a moment, but right now we need to get as far away from them as possible!”  
Back where the funhouse had been, screams and shouts erupted as people started to notice the strange creatures and were no doubt attacked by them.  
“They’ve seen me, and they’ve seen me with you, which means they’ll track us. Anyone between them and us is in danger of being turned negaty, so we need to lose them, and fast!”  
“Well, here, then!” Emery cut off to the side and lead them into a building. It was a haunted house attraction.  
“NO!” Pose yiped. “This is a bad idea!”  
“Nono, it’s all good! ’Cause it’s dark in here, see? They won’t be able to find us!”  
Pose faltered. The logic seemed sound.  
“Maybe if we wait, they’ll go on past and think we left the carnival.”  
Emery took the lead and pulled Pose through the black-light tunnels of cheap ghosts and monster decorations with canned sound effects until they were in a darkened area off to the side of the main walking path. It seemed like a light had blown out here.  
“Okay, now spill,” Emery whispered. “What are those things and what do they want?”  
Pose sighed. “The truth is… my parents didn’t drop me off here; my boss did. I come from a sideways part of reality where positive and negative emotions turn into magic that people like me can use to do various things.”  
“People like you?” Emery frowned and drew back a little.  
“Yes. I’m a juxtapose, not a normality.”  
“What?!”  
“Every person possesses both positive and negative emotions. Those people are normalities. When normies are brought into Wonderworld, their positive or negative emotions can skewer, turning them into negative or positive versions of themselves. It doesn’t happen automatically – for instance you’re still normal, and probably so are most of the people outside. But if something like those rejection monsters gets a hold of someone, they can take a look into their hearts and reflect whatever their hearts most reject, then magnify it.  
Emery’s eyes went wide. “Those things can turn people negative?”  
“Into other negative monsters, yes,” Pose nodded.  
“And they’re after you?”  
“No,” Pose sighed. “I can’t be turned. I don’t have any magic left in me – I’m a juxtapose, not a normality. When I moved to Wonderworld, my companions and I gave up our magic for the good of others. We run a sort of … rehabilitation facility, I guess you could call it, for people whose lives are extremely unbalanced.”  
Pain shot through Pose’s chest at the recollection of home.  
“Because I gave up my own positive and negative magic, I can’t be turned. But they saw me with you, and you can be.”  
“But why would they target us? And where did they even come from?”  
Pose opened her mouth to answer but could not think of a good reason. “I . . . don’t know? I know I saw myself with different reflections in different mirrors in that funhouse, and you didn’t seem to notice, but…”  
Emery frowned. “Why would-”  
Before he could finish his sentence, shouting and loud barking came from the direction of the entrance.  
“Time to move!” Pose said.  
The duo set off again. At one point, Emery stopped them and reached for something at the floor. To Pose’s surprise, he lifted up a curtain and shooed her under. Behind it was an emergency exit sign and door. She breathed a sigh of relief.  
“I could kiss you! How do you know this place so well?”  
Emery blushed and laughed. “Eh, well, when you’re bored enough, ya pay attention to little details.”  
They slipped out the back and found they were near the carnival’s entrance pathway.  
“We’ve got to get back to the subway.” She turned away from the entrance. The attraction claiming to be an underground train was the opposite direction by a short jog. “If we can get back to the main station, maybe I can get a message through to-”  
They’d been swimming against the metaphorical tide, and someone slammed shoulder first into Pose’s face, knocking her back into Emery, and then the ground. Both kids got back to their feet quickly, and continued toward the subway, but this time it was slower going. Pose’s face was throbbing and her head hurt.  
“I’ll… I dunno, I’ll write a message in my notebook and maybe…” She reached for her back pocket, but the notebook wasn’t there. Her eyes went wide and her heart skipped a beat. She checked her other back pocket, to no avail, then turned and looked back the way they’d come.  
Her notebook had been knocked loose when they fell. She started to go back for it, but Emery grabbed her arm.  
“Look!”  
Just beyond the notebook, one of the dog-like beasties made out of mirror shards was slowly stalking toward them, nose to the ground like it was following a scent.  
“It’ll find that notebook, or it’ll find us!” Emery said. “Leave it! Let’s go!” He pulled her toward the subway ride.  
“No! You don’t understand! That notebook’s my life!”  
“It’s going to cost you your life if you don’t leave it!”  
They reached the stairs, but Pose was still protesting.  
“If I don’t get it back, I may not have a chance to get a message through to the rest of the crew that I need help!”  
The rejection that had been heading toward the notebook found it, threw its head back, and let out a howl louder than any siren either of the kids had ever heard. A chill streaked through Pose like an electric shock – it was a call for the beastie’s companions to regroup.  
“Come on!” Emery shouted, yanking Pose down the stairs.  
Tears streamed down her face as she stumbled and struggled behind the skater boy. Her entire life’s work was in that notebook: all of her notes for every production, notes on how rehearsals had gone, on things that needed altering, private thoughts about how the others interacted and how she could turn that into characters in future productions, everything!  
“I’m nothing without that notebook!” she sobbed as they reached the bottom and Emery hopped the turnstile. Pose crawled under and through the thing, awkwardly. Her normal self would have been tall enough to go over the gate, but this tween mockery of a body she was trapped in was too small.  
Emery pulled her through as shouts and screams started at the top of the subway stairs.  
“Hey,” he said, grabbing her elbows and looking her in the eye. “I don’t know where you came from or what you are,” he said, “But I know one thing: you’re a good person. You talked about giving up your own magic with your friends to help others, and you could have run away when those things attacked and left me to be their easy prey, but you didn’t. You can always write in another notebook. Whatever memories are attached to it, you’ll still have them in your heart. And you can make new ones!”  
Barking and growling quickly descended the stairs as the subway train rolled to a stop and opened its doors.  
“But you need to make it out of this mess in order to be able to do that, okay? And that means leaving something important to you behind for now.”  
Pose looked back up the steps toward the path where her notebook had last been seen. How would she ever get it back, now?  
“Cleo,” Emery said.  
It felt like a gong went off in Pose’s head. She’d heard him say that name before, but where? Why did the world feel different? There wasn’t any magic being used here, except the subway train, but that shouldn’t have given her vertigo.  
“Come back, soon. Bring help.” Emery shoved her into the subway car as the doors were closing and turned around to face the snarling beasties.  
“NO!” Pose cried, slamming fists on the door’s windows. “EMERY, NO!”  
The train was already pulling away, but Pose saw it and it made her blood run cold. A dark circle had appeared on the ground below Emery and was throwing off his positive and negative balance. His body jerked spastically, and the face that looked briefly at the train as it left was both pained, and threatening. His eyes burned red.  
“NO!” Pose screamed, and collapsed to the floor, still slamming her fists against the doors.


	5. Without Balance There Is No... Friendship?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pose, going by the "normal" name of Cleo, finds herself in everyone's worst nightmare: school. But she manages to make a new friend, remember that she has hidden talents, and do a kind thing for someone else. Wait, how did Balan get a note through when no one was looking?

“Without Balance There Is No…”  
Chapter 5 – “…Friendship?”

Pose was still in a state when the subway came to its next stop and the doors opened. She stepped out in a zombified daze, absently bumping other people as she tried to navigate the stairs up to this stop. They were washed out teal on gray tile, this time. If she’d been her normal, snappy self, she would have commented about it being better than the last place’s color choice, but at the thought of leaving the last station behind, a lump crept up her throat.  
The steps came out on a cold and damp street. It was very gray and busy, and appeared to be early morning. It suited how Pose felt – not 100% awake or aware. She crossed the street to the gigantic campus in front of her, still not really feeling like herself.  
I left him behind. All he did was try to help me and I left him behind. What’s wrong with me? And now I don’t even have my notebook to try and ask Balan and the others for help. Would they have even gotten the message? What if there’s no magic left, back home? Did the end of it all get wasted on me? That would be horrible. I’m a horrible person to have wasted it on – I let some poor boy get turned into a monster because of my notebook. If only I hadn’t dropped it. If only I’d run a little bit faster. If only I could write!  
Pose passed into a main building and wandered down busy hallways. She stopped at a dark teal locker and removed some books. A bell rang. People around her broke from standing in clusters talking and bolted. It finally dawned on her she was going through familiar motions with no real idea of what was going on.  
“Where am I? Is this a school?”  
She looked around for familiar faces, but found none.  
“Great. Just great. Isn’t this, like, every bad dream ever? Wake up in a school and not know your schedule, or where your classes are?” She held a hand up to rub her forehead, and then saw something. On the inside of her hand there were numbers scribbled in pen. It looked like her own hand writing – the threes were curly and the sevens were crossed – but she couldn’t remember having put them there.  
Her clothes and body had changed, too. She wasn’t a short, awkward tween anymore. She appeared to be a young teen – just starting to grow into a proper female shape. Pose chuckled to herself. When she’d actually been this age, she’d been shy about what puberty was doing to her. Now she was just vaguely annoyed that her clothes didn’t fit properly.  
The first number written on her hand was 205. She looked around the hallway and found she wasn’t far off, if they were room numbers. Pose shut the locker and hurried down the hall to the correct room, sliding in and finding an empty seat right before the bell rang.  
Material around the room indicated it was a math class, so she went through the books she had taken from the locker until she found the correct one and opened it to a bookmarked page. There was a sheet of problems in her handwriting – homework.  
Well, at least this is a dream where for once I’m well prepared, she thought.  
And then she realized she had no writing implements.  
Famous last words…  
“Cleo Raig?” the teacher called.  
“Present,” Pose sighed, “However, I seem to have misplaced my pencils. Might I borrow one for the duration of this class period?”  
The teacher raised brows at her.  
“I’ve got it, sir!” a girl at the desk beside her said. She passed Pose a fresh pencil that looked as though it had been dipped in pink, yellow, and blue glitter.  
Pose stared at it for a moment, trying to remember why those colors of glitter were important. She knew they were… It was something to do with the magic…  
She took the pencil and thanked the other girl.  
“My name’s Lissa,” she said. “You’re new, right?”  
Pose’s mind raced, trying to remember how she’d arrived here originally, but then, as with Emery, decided the free excuse was best. “Yeah, kind of…”  
“I was new last year. Have you found a friend or two, yet?”  
Pose swallowed a lump in her throat. The last friend she’d made, she left to be turned into a monster.  
Lissa must have seen the sadness and interpreted it differently. “It’ll come with time. Would you like to eat lunch with me until you find your way around a little better?”  
Pose nodded with a small smile. “Thank you. I greatly appreciate it.”  
Lissa smiled. “You sound like you come from a very proper family. I’m jealous.”  
Pose blurted a tiny bit of laughter, surprising herself. She wanted to say, I don’t even remember my family, but instead she went with, “Well, everyone has something that makes them unique.”  
Where did that come from? raced through her thoughts.  
As the class went on, Pose discovered something else nightmarish about this situation – she was horrible at math. The teacher went over the homework, and most of her answers were wrong. Then, during the new lesson, she found that barely any of it made sense. Was this algebra? Geometry? Something else?  
Lissa noticed her struggling several times and reached over to tap various parts of whatever problem Pose was working on, then wrote lightly what needed to be done to complete the next steps.  
Pose mouthed the words ‘Thank you’ to the other girl.  
When the bell rang and class dismissed, Pose checked what the next number written on her hand was. Lissa went beside her in the hallway.  
“Do you have any idea where B36 is?” Pose asked.  
Lissa laughed. “It’s in the basement. And as a matter of fact, it’s my next class, too – it’s Home Economics.”  
Pose sighed with relief. “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t know how I would manage this without help.”  
Lissa laughed. “No one’s ever told me that before. Usually I just blend in with the background.”  
Pose was surprised. “You’re so helpful, though!”  
Lissa shrugged. “But usually no one needs my help. It’s easier to just be quiet and go unnoticed.”  
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t go unnoticed with me.”  
The girls made their ways down to the basement level. The home-ec class was to be working with baked goods today, and it became very apparent, very quickly, that the poor tiny woman who was the teacher was going to spend most of the class troubleshooting.  
Lissa found them an island to work at and showed Pose where all of the ingredients were, and where all of the equipment was stored, and then confessed that while she was adept at maths, she wasn’t so good in the kitchen.  
Pose wasn’t that bothered. Baking was second nature to her. She smiled and browsed the available ingredients before choosing a few and asking Lissa to help her carry them back to their space.   
Lissa explained that the first few days they’d been doing this unit, the teacher had tried to teach them how to make simple cornbread. One of the students’ attempts had gone so wrong that one of the ovens had caught fire and the class had to leave the building until the safety crew could make sure things were no longer a danger.  
Pose laughed at the story while measuring out various ingredients and asking Lissa to hold or hand her other ones.  
“I’m… sorry, what are we making?” Lissa asked.  
“Cupcakes,” Pose said. “Do you have a flavor preference? We can always split the batch and make multiples, if you’d like.”  
Lissa’s mouth fell open.  
“Chocolate? Vanilla? I’m fond of strawberry, myself,” Pose confessed.  
She went back over to the ingredients area and returned with a canister of cocoa powder and a brown packet. Lissa frowned at them.  
“Can you pull out two more mixing bowls for me?”  
Lissa did as she was told. “I’m so confused. How do you know what you’re doing?”  
Pose poured a third of the mix into each of the new bowls, then measured some cocoa powder into one and dumped a portion of the packet into the other. It was a red powder. “Gelatin mix,” she clarified, “For the strawberry flavor.”  
“I am so impressed,” Lissa said quietly.  
“Eh,” Pose shrugged. “When you do it a lot, it becomes second nature. And I don’t mind. Everyone always likes the finished product, so that makes it worth it. Grab some cupcake liners for me?”  
Lissa did, and started popping them into pans.  
While they worked, they talked about various occasions of maths gone right and gone awry, and baking gone right and gone awry. Pose confessed she had never been good with math, though she couldn’t quite remember how she knew that. Lissa laughed and said it wasn’t her favorite either, but at least she found it easy. Her passion was designing costumes.  
Pose froze, midway through plopping batter into a cupcake liner.  
“You okay?” Lissa asked.  
Pose faltered a laugh and finished what she was doing. “Uh, yeah, sorry! I just… Wow, you do costumes? That sounds really hard!”  
Her heart raced. A thousand possibilities crossed her mind. Did she know Lissa before? Was this some kind of memory? Was this some convoluted way of dealing with her first notebook request for a better wardrobe designer? Had someone back at the theater actually gotten her notes?  
“It’s not really hard for me. It’s fun!” Lissa said, in her tiny and quiet voice. “I love taking an idea for a concept, and imagining how it would work in reality, if it were a person inside the concept. Then I try to think of how it would look to go with the actions, and sketch it out.”  
Since Lissa was just standing aside while Pose put the pans of cupcake batter in their station’s oven, she dug through her stack of books and pulled out a sketchbook. She flipped it open and held up a page full of colored pencil sketches for Pose to see.  
Pose’s mouth fell open. “Those are gorgeous!” she said. They all looked like strange creatures that could have walked out of Cirque du Soleil or Alice in Wonderland, but there were parts of them that were clearly human body parts, making it apparent that these were costumes. Beside some of the drawings were sketches of what looked like mechanical mockups, to show how a piece of the costume would work or move.  
She was still trying to soak them all in when Lissa quickly shut the book, looked down, and became very introverted. Pose couldn’t figure out why until a boy walked past them and said, “Hi, Lissa. I like your shirt, today.” Pose arced a brow, but the boy continued on. Lissa, on the other hand, was terribly red in the face.  
“Crush?” Pose asked.  
“Uh… maybe. He saw my sketchbook when I was working on it, once, and said something about it to the drama teacher.” She looked up at Pose with a tiny little smile on her face and her cheeks bright, bright red. “The teacher asked to see them, and then invited me to be the costume designer for the school’s drama group. It’s a big honor, but I feel like it’s too much for me.”  
“Ah,” Pose said, nodding. “And since he’s the one who got you the spot, you’re shy about talking to him?”  
Lissa nodded a tiny little nod.  
“That’s absolutely adorable,” Pose said, gathering up some colored paper from a shelf in their station. She started folding it.  
“Lunch is our next period, so… If you wanna… I mean, if you don’t mind… We could… maybe…”  
Pose looked up from her folding.  
“Um…”  
Pose frowned and tilted her head.  
“Go see some of the costumes I’ve had time to sew and build?”  
“Oh!” Pose realized the shyness was because of Lissa trying to show her own work. “Yes! Definitely! I’d love to see them!” She gave Lissa the biggest smile she could, trying to emulate the showman’s smile that she normally abhorred. But in this case, it was needed. Lissa needed the boost. And she deserved it. Pose got the impression she was a really good person – it was a shame she was so shy.  
While holding the folded paper flat, Pose grabbed a pen with her free hand, uncapped it with her mouth, and wrote something on the paper. Then she put the cap back on the pen and asked Lissa to please go grab two packs of cream cheese, some powdered sugar, butter, and the container of vanilla.  
“What are we doing now?” Lissa asked.  
“Icing. You can grab some food coloring, too, if you want,” Pose said.  
“I can’t believe you just know how to make this stuff, Cleo,” Lissa said.  
That gong sensation slammed through Pose’s mind. That’s my name. When was it my name? I’m not borrowing it to play a role; that’s who I used to be!  
The timer went off and to pull the cupcakes from the oven. Cleo instructed Lissa on how to shift them to a cooling rack on a tray and then to move them to the freezer for a few minutes. Meanwhile, she got out a mixer and threw together the icing, then divided it into three bowls as well, added some food dye, and handed one of the bowls and a spatula to Lissa to mix while she did the others.  
“This is mind blowing,” Lissa said. “The only thing I’ve ever assisted with making in my life were burnt pancakes.”  
Cleo burst out laughing. “Well, at least we’re not using a stove-top pan for cupcakes. They’re a little harder to burn.”  
When the icing was finished, the girls brought the cupcakes back from the freezer to finish them. The poor teacher was still fussing about, juggling three struggling student groups who couldn’t finish their own projects.  
“These turned out spectacular,” Lissa said.  
“Why don’t you go grab some sprinkles for us?” Pose said.  
When Lissa was walking away, Cleo pulled out the folded piece of paper and gave it a quick thwack. It opened into a 3D box. She popped it open and dropped a cupcake in, then snagged another student who was walking by.  
“What’s that boy’s name?” she indicated the guy from before.  
“Oh, that’s Justin,” the other student said.  
“Thanks.”  
Cleo quickly wrote To Justin, With thanks for the job lead, Lissa, and stuffed the box under the desk before Lissa came back with the sprinkles. The other girl had chosen the typical rainbow beads. Not very creative, Cleo thought, but it’ll be fine.  
“Okay, one more job before the bell rings,” Cleo said, grabbing the sprinkles and quickly showering the whole batch. “I’ve got to move these to an airtight container for later. Or a shirt box, if the teacher doesn’t have something else. Can you deliver a package for me?”  
“Uh, sure?” Lissa said.  
“Consider this my thanks for helping with math,” Cleo winked. She handed Lissa the papercraft box and said, “This goes to Justin.”  
Lissa’s face blanched.  
“No fussing! That’s for people with stage fright!” Cleo turned Lissa around and gave her a gentle shove. “Gogogo! I have cupcakes to pack up!”  
With a whimper, Lissa scuffed and shuffled across the room to deliver the package.  
Cleo grinned and tried not to look at her new friend as she packed up the rest of the treats. Everyone has to leave the nest and do their own thing eventually.  
And then she noticed a ripped piece of note on the edge of their work-station.  
Good job. There was a hand-drawn emoji with it of a winking face with a big, toothy grin.


	6. Without Balance There Is No... Inspiration?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cleo (Pose) becomes fast friends with Lissa and learns that her passion is designing costumes. Balan shows up in a window-reflection, takes an ear beating, and admits he doesn't know how to get Pose home. And then something negaty comes through the dressing room mirrors for Lissa...

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 6 – “ …Inspiration?”**

_Good job_.

Pose stared at the note for a moment, then reached out and slipped it in her pocket.

“I don’t have my notebook,” she said quietly. “How can you tell if I did something good or not?” A lump rose in her throat. “And for that matter, if you can see what’s going on, why didn’t you help save Emery?” In her pocket, she crumpled the paper into a wadded ball with anger and struggled to hold back tears.

Lissa returned from delivering the cupcake box to Justin, and Cleo had to compose herself quickly.

“That was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done,” Lissa confessed. But she was smiling.

It was hard to stay mad at Balan when Lissa was here and so in need of someone to help her come out of her shell.

The bell rang.

The girls talked to the teacher about keeping their baked goods until later and then headed to the cafeteria. They got a quick bite to eat, and then Lissa lead the way to a gigantic room in a back hallway, which ran behind the auditorium. The closer they got, the livelier Lissa became. She rambled on excitedly about various concepts she had been given and turned into designs, and then costumes.

Pose was smiling and nodding, but only half paying attention. She was trying to figure out how that arrogant guy was keeping tabs on her, and why he hadn’t decided to do anything besides send a note. Maybe there wasn’t enough magic left to do anything bigger than that?

_Then he shouldn’t have sent me here in the first place! As it is, whenever I get back, we’re going to have to return to that carnival to stop those rejections and help that boy._

They arrived at a set of double doors and Lissa pushed through the one, then held her hands up in a showy way. They were in a large, dimly lit room with a high ceiling and row after row of costumes, all different colors, hanging from clothing racks. There were a few mannequins around the room, a few wearing completed pieces, others wearing partially completed ones. Two different tables had sewing machines, and some other kind of machines, and a third and fourth table were strewn with bolts of fabric and fabric cuttings. What looked like an old and beat up card table sat next to bins and tubs full of upholstery foam, plastic piping, coils of wire, and _tools_. Tools like ought to be in a wood shop were sitting there with a hot glue gun and stock pile of Styrofoam scraps.

“Welcome to Heaven!” Lissa smiled. “This is my favorite spot in the school! Like what I’ve done with the place?”

Cleo couldn’t find words at first. Then the all-consuming question became, “Did you make all of these yourself?”

“Yup.”

“ _All_ of them?!” Cleo asked.

“Every single one,” Lissa nodded. “Here, let me show you some of my newer ones.”

She moved to a mannequin in a green mishmash of wires and who-knows-what.

“This is a character I designed to be a moody plant,” she said. “The lower half are just green leggings, so the actor can move freely, and they’re supposed to wear brown slip-on shoes with it, like roots. But then once you get to the body,” she moved her hands to show what she was talking about, “you get the tangle of vines and stems of a bush. They come out to form poufy bush sleeves, covered in oversized leaves so that even if you’re in the back of the audience, you can tell this is a plant body. Now the head,” she took off what was some kind of helmet apparatus. “This is a repurposed bucket,” she explained, holding it in such a way that Pose could peer inside. “I’ve added holes to make it breathable, and padding to make it comfortable for a longer scene. There’s a contraption on the outside I had to build which,” she indicated a wire connecting the helmet piece to the neck and ran her hand down the arm of the costume, “connects to a controller in the glove. It lets the wearer change the face it’s displaying on the head!”

Lissa pressed something in the costume’s glove. The helmet, which had previously been displaying a happy, yellow flower face, spun slightly in her hand and displayed an angry, red flower face. Bushy petals went in every direction. She pushed the glove’s controller again and the helmet spun to a sad, blue flower face.

“That is _amazing_!” Pose gaped.

Lissa beamed, then put the helmet back and moved to another mannequin.

“This one,” she continued, “Was designed for a medieval comedy.” She showed Pose a bright orange and yellow dragon costume, made from shimmery fabric.

“The costume alone is gorgeous!” Pose said, impressed.

Lissa grinned. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” she intoned. “Check this out.” She turned the costume around to show a pair of elaborate wings that were moving slightly. When Lissa let go of the mannequin, the wings continued to move. And continued. And continued.

“What…?” Pose sputtered.

“You know those little bird toys that look like they’re taking a drink from a cup and then sitting up, and then they drink from the cup again, and sit up again, forever?” Lissa asked.

Pose nodded. They were novelty toys.

“These are made with a similar chemical and hydraulics system. As the gas and liquid shift in the pack here,” she indicated a small box between the wings, “it turns gears to move the wings. As long as the person on stage is wearing them, they’ll continue to flap slowly, giving the illusion that the dragon is flying.”

“Woooow,” Pose said.

“It breathes fire, too.”

“ _What_?!”

Lissa laughed. “Not a whole lot. I talked to some of the mechanics guys down in the shops and they hooked me up with a dummed-down version of a blow torch. Step back. It shoots about one foot.”

Pose stepped well back and watched as Lissa held the head of the dragon costume to a certain angle.

“I rigged it through the arm again, so the actors could use it while they were on stage without looking out of place. You hit the button aaaand…”

There was a splurt of blue-to-orange flames from the nostrils of the headpiece, as though it had sneezed flames. Pose’s eyes went wide.

“It’s far enough forward from the wearer that it won’t burn a face, but I had to be careful to cover the whole costume in a fire-resistant coating in case someone leaned forward while using the flame burst. It wouldn’t do to have the snout catch on fire while on stage.”

Pose nodded, mouth still hanging.

“And I just finished this one,” Lissa moved on again. “This is for our Ice Princess play, coming up in January.” She moved to a mannequin in a white costume. Its legs looked like bubble-style boots from an old magical-girl TV show, ending in giant, L-shaped, white-foam feet. The torso looked like a winter bubble-coat, made of snow. The texture on the fabric shimmered and looked like it was actually flakes of snow all stuck together. The head was a huge sphere, like a mascot costume, wearing comical-looking, rabbit-shaped earmuffs.

“It’s beautiful! Is this a good guy or a bad guy?” Pose asked.

“Both, depending on which scene it is. He changes alignment part way through the play. But this is the cool part,” Lissa said. She held up both of the costume’s arms and pressed one of the boots funny with her own foot. Mist shot up out of the costume’s arms and floated down, leaving white residue all around.

“Ohmygosh!” Pose jumped. Then she laughed. “How in the world did you do that?!”

Lissa smiled her biggest smile yet. “It’s a solution I asked the chem labs to order for me that they use in some prop-making for movies. It starts out compressed, like hair spray, but when it comes out, it chills and forms tiny ice crystals that melt in about five minutes – more if the stage lights are blaring on it. But it makes for a cool effect, right?”

“You _definitely_ found your calling in life!” Pose laughed.

Lissa laughed too, but something in her face changed.

“What’s wrong?” Pose asked.

Lissa tried to keep laughing, but she turned and walked slowly across the room as she did it. She ran a hand along one of the sewing tables and over the machine. “I don’t think I can keep doing this sort of thing for a living. I’m supposed to go to a really high-class college. The kind that only take you for your good grades. There’s no arts courses there at all. I’ll be training to be an accountant.”

Pose blinked after her new friend. “Can’t you just change where you’re going?”

“Not while I still live under my parents’ roof,” Lissa said. “I have to go where they want me to go for school, and do what they want me to do for a job, until I can make a living on my own and get my own place. Then I can try to do this again if I haven’t lost my interest in it.” She smoothed out a piece of fabric on one of the tables.

Pose deflated a little. “That’s horrible. I’m not sure what to say for that. I understand how it is to be obligated to a duty, but on the other hand, you ought to be allowed to continue to have fun hobbies. Otherwise, what’s the point in going on, day to day?”

A chime came over the PA system.

“ _Would miss Cleo Raig please come to the office? Cleo Raig to the office. Thank you._ ”

Pose slouched. “I’ll be right back. But these are amazing, Lissa, and you shouldn’t have to be sad about a future when you’ve got this much talent! We’ll figure something out.”

Lissa smiled sadly and held a hand up to wave goodbye as Pose excused herself back out the double doors.

This back hall of the school ran along the rear of the building, so one side was all windows. Peripherally, something in the reflection didn’t jive with Pose’s own movements, and it drew her attention. She glanced sidelong and did a doubletake.

The pompous, high-hatted jerk was striding along instead of her in the reflection.

Pose stopped and crossed her arms, clearing her throat.

Balan startled and looked toward her, “Oh! Hello there!”

“What’s going on?!” Pose demanded. “And how do I get home?!”

Balan smiled nervously and held a hand behind his head to scratch the back of his neck. “Ah, well, you see…”

Pose’s expression fell, unimpressed. “You don’t know how to get me home?”

“Well, er, the thing is…” He leaned forward and poked his two index fingers together.

“You _did_ use up all the magic we had left for this ordeal?” Pose felt even worse.

Balan looked away in a big, distracted sweep to look for anything else interesting beside Pose. “Maaaaaaaaaaaybe?”

Pose held a hand to her face and rubbed her temples. “I don’t believe this… Trapped on the inside, somewhere, with no way to get home, and no way to get out and get more magic.”

“You could always search the nooks and crannies of Wonderworld in case we’ve missed some,” he suggested, holding his noodly arms up in a shrug.

“And maybe you could,” her voice rose to a yell, “ _not send people into magic trains when there’s not enough magic left to get them back!_ ”

Balan laughed, holding one hand to his stomach and wiping a fake tear from one eye. “I know, right? What a silly thing to do! I mean, you would need a reeeeeeally good reason to do something like that, right?”

“Of all of the _stupid, self-centered, irresponsible, thoughtless-_ ”

A scream cut through the hallway. Pose and Balan’s reflection in the window both turned toward the costume room, but then Pose bolted toward it.

Lissa was at the far end, at a triple mirror used for checking and adjusting costumes during fittings. The reflections were gone. In them, there was darkness with neon lightning, and deep growling sounds were coming through from the other side.

“ _Lissa, get away from there!_ ” Pose called.

Her friend turned around and said, “Cleo?”

A black, dripping, clawed hand reached through the middle mirror for Lissa. Pose arrived first, snagged her new friend by the wrist, and took off for the hallway. They burst through the double doors and Pose slammed them shut.

“I am _not_ losing someone else! Balan, how do we get out of here?!” she called to the hallway window reflection as they continued to run.

“Head back to the subway train,” he said, keeping up in a smooth glide.

“Can she ride with me?” Pose asked, nodding back toward Lissa.

Behind them, there was loud barking and scraping at the double doors.

“Cleo, what’s going on?!” Lissa cried.

“I’m not sure,” Balan said, looking uncertain. “Usually only the cast and crew can ride the _trains of thought_.”

“Do we have _any_ magic left I can use? Maybe we can use it to bind her to me until we’re someplace safe.”

Balan held his hands up in a helpless shrug.

“You’re _useless_!” Pose shouted, and then they were out of the hallway and away from the glass.

She hated to admit it, but that left her feeling alone again. Even with trying to take care of Lissa, knowing that someone else from the theater was with her made it feel like the situation was manageable. Lissa had no idea what was going on and was practically as vulnerable as Emery had been.

“Where are we going? And what was that thing?” Lissa asked.

“We’re going to the subway for a minute,” Pose said. “I’ll explain when we get there.”

A ways behind them, the double doors burst open and loud barking echoed down the hall.

“ _And we needa hurry_ ,” she added.


	7. Without Balance There Is No... Networking?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cleo comes clean with Lissa about who she is and where she's from. Justin joins the group, and together they decide to come up with a plan to fix things.

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 7 – “ …Networking?”**

The girls blew through the front doors of the school with sounds of loud growling and barking coming from behind them. They ran across the street and down into the subway tunnel that brought a large number of the students to school. It was still dreary outside, and the fog made the steps slippery with condensation. Lissa slipped, but Cleo caught her arm and they managed to keep going.

Behind them, the glass doors that formed the front of the school banged, then banged a second time, then shattered in unison and a loud howl followed the sound of all the shards of glass hitting the concrete.

Pose chanced a glance back and quickly regretted it. All of the broken windows were changing into more _rejections_ and starting down the school steps for the street.

“Lissa, I’m very scared and I don’t know if this is going to work, but we _have_ to get on the subway train!”

“I’ve ridden the subway before,” Lissa gasped, out of breath.

“Good. Hold onto my hand and _do not let go_!” Pose instructed.

They pulled student subway passes out of their pockets, blew through the gates, and slipped into closing doors right before the train was ready to leave.

Pose looked down at their clasped hands, then at Lissa – who was still there, and quite whole.

“Ohthankgoodness,” Pose said. She let out a deep exhale, let go of Lissa’s hand, and flopped into an empty seat.

Lissa was almost crying from exertion and fear. “What is going _on_?”

Pose held up a finger. “Let me… catch my breath…”

Over the course of the ride, after they had recovered, Pose explained to Lissa the same way she had to Emery, and then about how she’d been dumped at the carnival, things had gone horribly wrong, and now her friend was gone. “I couldn’t lose you, too,” she ended. “I didn’t know if you could come on the subway with me, but you’re here and haven’t disappeared yet, so that’s something.”

Lissa nodded her thanks. “But what do we do, now?”

“I’m not sure,” Pose confessed. “One of my friends showed up in a reflection back in the school and said there wasn’t enough magic left in the system to get me home, but that we might be able to find some if we looked around here long enough.”

“Well, what’s it look like, and where’s it come from?” Lissa asked. “I’ll help, if it’ll get this situation fixed. It’s the least I can do for the help you’ve given me today.”

Pose blinked. “I didn’t help you. You took me in as a new person, helped me with math, made sure I wasn’t alone at lunch, and helped me feel better on my first day.”

Lissa smiled sadly. “I told you, normally I’m very introverted. I don’t talk to people. You were very easy to talk to. No one ever _wants_ my help in math. I’ve never had a home-ec partner as talented as you, nor willing to listen to me blather on about how I got my wardrobe job. You gave me that sweet little cupcake to thank Justin with. And you were properly impressed with all of my costumes. NO ONE ever appreciates all of the work I put into those!”

“Well, as a playwright, I can tell you there’s a market for them. If you can sway your parents, places like where I work pay top dollar for people like you.”

“They really do?” Lissa asked, face lightening.

Cleo took both of her friend’s hands. “You. Have. Talent. Don’t ever let anyone smother it.”

The subway slid to a stop at a green and black station with graffiti all over the walls.

“Any idea where we are?” Lissa asked.

“Nope. But let’s go face it together.”

The girls climbed the stairs from the rather empty subway station and found a rainy city street, at night. It wasn’t a bad downpour or anything, but there was a steady sprinkle of heavy drops going on. In the distance, saxophone music filled the air. They headed for a restaurant’s awning to stay dry and get their bearings.

“I like that tune,” Cleo said, as they snagged some napkins from a sidewalk table and patted their faces dry.

“It sounds familiar,” Lissa said. “I like it, too.”

“It’s a song from a film noir musical that’s about twenty years old,” a waiter said.

The girls startled at not noticing someone else was there, and then both stared at him.

“Justin?!” Lissa gasped.

He was taller by a little, and dressed very proper, with an apron and a bow tie.

“When did you get bigger?” Lissa asked.

Justin raised a brow at her.

Cleo poked Lissa in the arm and indicated their reflections in the restaurant’s windows. Both girls’ outfits had changed and their ages had altered to be late teens. Their styles of dress weren’t overly different, but the clothing had become more teen-centric.

“Probably you’re just not used to seeing him outside of a school setting,” Pose covered, laughing nervously.

Justin grunted. “Did you ladies want a table?”

“Uh…” Lissa struggled.

“Sure!” Cleo said. “We’ve, uh… Got to wait for someone to meet us later.”

Justin shrugged. “Do you wanna sit out here with the pleasant weather, or come inside where it’s dry?”

Pose said, “Seat us where _you_ like to sit.”

Justin looked surprised. “Follow me,” he said, then turned and headed into the restaurant.

Lissa turned and mouthed _Thank you!_ to Cleo again.

Justin took them to a booth in the back corner of the restaurant, where they had a clear view of both the rest of the floor, and the kitchen and its workings.

“You’re welcome to decline,” Justin said, “But I like being able to see everyone else while I sit. It helps me keep a tally running in my head of what needs to be taken care of later.”

“Are you a waiter or a busboy or both?” Cleo asked.

Justin seemed impressed by the question. “My official title is waiter, but on nights when there’s low traffic, we do double duty as busboys, so they don’t have to pay extra staff to stand around doing nothing. You’ll see us coming through doing general clean up and prep in the dining room, later on.”

“Wow, you wear all the hats, huh?” Pose said. “Do you cook the meals, too?”

“Eeeeh…” He shuffled. “I burn things when I try to cook.”

“Me too!” Lissa blurted. Surprised by her own outburst, her hands flew to her mouth and her face went red.

“Really?” Justin asked, surprised. “I seem to recall you made me a delicious cupcake in freshman year.”

Cleo grinned. Lissa slid down in her seat and her hands covered her face.

“I had help,” she squeaked.

“You should see her with a sewing machine,” Cleo offered.

“So, you sew instead of cook, huh?” Justin asked.

Lissa nodded.

“Her costume workroom is _amazing_ ,” Cleo said. “ _Completely_ blew my mind.”

“Wow. Maybe I should bother you the next time I’ve got a performance scheduled.”

Both girls sat up. “Performance?”

“Well, I mean, most of my time is spent either at school or here. The guy who runs the restaurant is so unorganized that I’ve gotta kinda run the gig for him – otherwise the place would never get cleaned up to snuff for guests. But when I’m _not_ here…” A huge smile spread across his face. “I do classes down at the community center to teach people modern dance.”

“You’re so good that you can _teach_ dance?!” Lissa asked.

He laughed embarrassedly. “Well, not to brag or anything, but… I’ve come up with a routine or two.”

“Can you show us?” Pose asked. “I mean, if you won’t get in trouble with your boss?”

Justin took a step back and looked around while taking his apron off. “Only because the customers asked,” he said, holding up a finger. He took one more step back, stood still for a moment, and then broken into a series of steps, twists, and spins that looked like they were right out of a music video from the King of Pop himself.

When he finished, Lissa and Cleo cheered and clapped. Justin took a bow and retied his apron.

“Now what can I interest you ladies in this evening?”

He took their orders and then headed back to the kitchen.

“Ohmygosh, I was so nervous. I thought I was going to vomit!” Lissa said, covering her face again. It was still bright red.

“You handled it very well,” Cleo assured.

“Thank you again for your help,” Lissa said.

Cleo smiled. “You just needed a jump-start. You’re fine once you get rolling.”

“So… That place you come from,” Lissa said, “you said it’s like a theater?”

Pose squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“But it’s magic, right?” her friend checked.

“It needs magic to do some things, yes,” Pose nodded.

“So… Where we are now, and where we were earlier, are… _not real_?”

“I’m inclined to think not. I think these are just places in Wonderworld, which kind of is where the theater exists, but the theater is at the surface level, and places like these are deeper. These places come into existence based on the hearts of people who come to see a show at the theater.”

“So, someone came to see a show and then you got stuck here?” Lissa asked.

“Er… no,” Pose said. “We…” Her head sank. “We haven’t had a production recently. I haven’t been able to write one.”

Lissa stared at her, eyes wide.

“I know! I know! It’s just-”

“You _write,_ too?” Lissa blurted.

“Pardon?”

“I assumed you must be some kind of awesome bakery person in your world!” Lissa said, face still full of perplexity. “But, well, I mean, I guess I should have guessed by the way you talked when you saw my costumes that you know a lot about theater, so obviously you don’t spend all day baking or anything like that, but I mean, it’s just…” Lissa trailed off.

Cleo smiled. “I like baking. I like it when people like what I bake. I do normal cooking, too, but my brother was always better on the stove than me. Back home, I used to do the big main spreads for lunch and dinner for the cast and crew. This one obnoxious pain-in-the-butt used to do the breakfast offerings. I don’t know where he gets the energy to be so chipper in the mornings, unless he’s downing coffee like a madman when no one else is looking, but it’s really irritating!”

When Pose looked across the table again, Lissa was grinning.

“What?”

“Sounds like you’re a fan.”

Pose’s face burned. “ _LIKE HELL!_ He is the most _self-absorbed, absent-minded, arrogant, jerk_ in the _world_!”

Lissa couldn’t contain her laughter.

“I HATE HIM!” Pose shouted. “It’s HIS fault _I’m_ in this mess, and _you_ got chased out of school, and Emery-” A lump climbed up Pose’s throat. “I don’t even know how to get him _back_! If I could have accessed just a smidgen of the theater’s pool of magic, then maybe I could have come up with some way to cut off the _rejections_ before they’d gotten to poor Emery, but there hasn’t been anyone new at the theater in months, so there hasn’t been any new magic added, and I haven’t written in months, and…”

She clunked her head on the table. “And it’s not his fault. It’s mine. If I’d been able to come up with something for a script, none of this would have happened. Balan just realized I was dead weight and cut me loose.”

Lissa tilted her head sideways. “Didn’t you say he was talking to you through a reflection back at the school?”

“Yeah, but he said he couldn’t figure out how to get me home.”

“Did he _say_ that?” Lissa asked.

Cleo stopped and looked up at her friend.

“Because a lot of what you were just spieling sounded like self-blame, and probably was out of context and over-exaggerated. _Not that I think you over-exaggerate_ , just, I think you might be a little too emotionally close to the situation to see it clearly, maybe? Perhaps being more hard on yourself than you need to be when looking at the overall situation?”

Pose blinked and thought back. _Had_ Balan said he couldn’t get her home? She frowned.

“No… _I_ said that, and he danced around giving me a proper response. Does that mean there _is_ a way for me to get home?” she thought out loud.

“How would you guys normally go about gathering up magic?” Lissa asked.

“Well,” Pose stopped and thought about how much explanation she would have to break into.

Justin arrived with their food. “Ladies, I’m sorry to say, it’s a slow night and I’ve been eavesdropping. May I sit with you and try to help figure out your problem?”

Cleo curled a lip and raised her brows. “You don’t think I’m making up some weird, hokey stuff about magic?”

Justin looked sympathetic. “Look, Cleo, is it? I’ve been trying to ask Lissa on a date for ages, and there’s never been an opportunity.”

“You have?” Lissa gasped.

He smiled across at her, then turned to Cleo again. “I knew you had a thumb in her back in 9th grade and I have a feeling I wouldn’t have gotten a chance to talk to her here tonight with you. So, if whatever you’re talking about is important enough that she’s trying to help you with it, I’ll help, too.”

Cleo’s shoulders relaxed. “You guys are _really_ good people. And really good friends.”

“It sounds like Emery was, too,” Lissa said. “We’ll figure out a way to save him.”

“Right,” Justin nodded, bringing up a chair to sit at the end of their table. “Let’s make a plan to find more of this magic stuff you’ll need to get the job done.


	8. Without Balance There Is No... Team?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth of Pose's problem finally comes out - why she can't write. Lissa and Justin try help, like good friends do. Then something dark and sinister attacks at a nearby store, turning people into monsters.

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 8 – “ …Team?”**

“Let’s start with: where does it come from?” Lissa asked.

Pose looked down at the plate of half-eaten food in front of her and thought for a moment. “You know how when you fry a piece of meat, a lot of the juices come out into the pan?”

The others nodded.

“Well, it’s kind of like that. When someone or something turns a _normality_ into a negative or positive version of itself, it converts them from a normal person, animal, plant, or thing into a negative or positive creature. The opposite energy seeps out like the juices from the meat and collects as magic dust if it’s a small amount, or magic crystals it it’s a larger amount, and those gather in the area local to where the conversion happened.

“Just to be clear,” Justin asked, “A _normality_ is a normal person?”

Pose rested her chin on the palm of one hand, propped on the table. “Right, sorry, you weren’t here for that explanation. Alright.

“This isn’t real life. This is a sort of reflection of real life in a place called Wonderworld, that exists in a reality that’s kind of beside real life. Portions of it manifest when a heart is out of balance. To keep people from accidentally falling through from one into the other and getting lost forever, wandering around with no way to get home, there have always been a kind of… doorkeeper staff. My friends and I found our way into Wonderworld, once, a long time ago, because the last of the former doorkeepers was dying. He wasn’t strong enough to get us all back out, so he had to teach us how to get out ourselves.

“When we _did_ get out, we had the choice to go home, or stay and become the new doorkeepers to Wonderworld. If we stayed, it meant giving up our positive and negative energy and becoming _juxtapose_ – a species of being that was formerly whole and is now split into two aspects of its former self. One of the _juxties_ will manifest a portion of someone’s talent, say… being a responsible person, and the other _juxtie_ will embody all of the opposite traits that person used to have, no matter how large or small they were.”

“So the other one would be the party animal backslash slacker, then?” Lissa confirmed.

Pose twitched a little. “Something like that, yes.”

Justin held a hand to his chin in thought.

“Can ‘ _juxtapose_ ’ handle the manifested magic differently than ‘ _normalities_ ’ can?” Lissa asked.

Pose nodded. “ _Normies_ can only accomplish small tasks with posity and negaty magic. _Juxties_ can use it to power advanced illusions, morph surroundings into other places or things, or even control where a person goes in Wonderworld. That’s why we’re the doorkeepers.”

“And you _were_ one, but now you’re not?” Justin asked.

Pose’s shoulders sagged. “I… lost my opposite half.”

They stared at her blankly.

“I’m…” she sagged even worse. “I’m Pose. I’m the serious one. I try to be responsible and make sure everyone’s on task. I write the productions that will make the best use of everyone’s talents and abilities, at least as far as I can observe them. But my opposite half, Purr, the pleasant, happy-go-lucky gal that everyone loves, up and disappeared. I didn’t notice at first; she annoys me some days. But then other people started asking about her and where she’d been, and that annoyed me worse.”

“You felt like they liked her more?” Lissa asked.

Pose looked up and felt a tingling in her sinus that preceded tears. She tried to hold them back with a hard swallow. “Maybe. I mean,” she looked down again, “It wasn’t like I didn’t _try_ to keep everyone happy. It was just…”

“You felt unappreciated in her shadow,” Justin said.

Pose gave a small nod.

“You were out of balance,” Lissa said gently.

Pose nodded and hot tears rolled down her cheeks. “I thought it didn’t matter – that I could manage without her. But the longer she was away, the harder it was for me to write. I couldn’t get a proper manuscript put together for the company, so we had to admit less and less people who had problems into Wonderworld. We can’t rebalance someone if we don’t have a script that suits their particular situation.” She rested both elbows on the table and propped her forehead on her hands, tiredly. “And the crew knew. They knew it was my fault, because I’d lost Purr. No one said anything, they just let me keep trying and struggling. Until…”

She dug her fingers into the skin of her forehead in anger and gritted her teeth.

“Until your one friend sent you here, and now you can’t get back home?” Lissa supplied.

Pose nodded.

“How do you, uh…” Justin looked confusedly to Lissa and then back at Cleo. “Do you just _find_ the other girl, or…? Do you have to do something else to rebalance yourself, first, or…? What? How does it work?”

Pose, still in tears, shook her head. “I don’t know. None of us really know. It’s never happened on our watch before.”

Lissa stood up from her side of the booth, leaned across the table and hugged Cleo’s curled-up head and shoulders. “It’s okay. No one should have to face that kind of thing alone. We’re here. We’ll help.”

Pose just sobbed for a moment.

Justin got up and brought back some soft drinks for them. Lissa snagged some extra napkins and helped Cleo dry her face.

“I didn’t get that explanation, before,” Lissa said to Justin. “That’s all new to me.”

Pose wiped her face off one more time and took a short drink, then said, “Sorry. Right, you asked about the magic.”

“It’s okay,” Justin said. “Better to get it out here in the open now than to discover the importance of it later when we could have already been utilizing the information.” And more to Lissa he added, “I’ve got five younger siblings. This isn’t my first rodeo with emotional upset and subsequent cleanup. Once the core of the problem comes out, you can actually start making some advances.”

Cleo laughed. “Glad I don’t always have to be the responsible one.”

“It sounds like your friends back home were trying to help and be responsible in their own ways, too,” Lissa said.

Cleo allowed a small nod, then took a deep breath.

“So, the magic,” she continued, “If I weren’t,” she indicated her own person, “stuck like this – if I were in my _juxtapose_ form, I could make use of the posity or negaty energy around us with no problems. But as it is, I’m going to have to hope I can get it to do at least _something_ helpful.”

“Those dog-monsters that chased us out of school,” she said to Lissa, “Those _rejections_ are born from Wonderworld mirrors. They observe prey, find what the person rejects about his or her self, and then force it to manifest, throwing off that person’s positive and negative balance. The imbalance throws off the person’s positive energy, which will then condense into magic we can try to make use of.”

“What attracts them?” Lissa asked.

Pose’s shoulders hunched. “Negative-tinged imbalance attracts them.”

Lissa thought about that for a moment, but Justin is who pointed it out.

“So they followed you because you’re only half of a _juxtapose_ and your other half is missing in action.”

She nodded.

Lissa propped her own chin on her hand. “If there’re creatures that sense and act on an imbalance toward the negative side of things, oughtn’t there to be a similar creature that can sense and act on an imbalance toward the positive side of things?”

Pose nodded. “The _rejection_ creatures look like dogs and come from mirrors. The _redemption_ creatures look like cats and come from live bodies of water – lakes or ponds or bays, that have a live feed of water from a stream or river flowing into or out of them. They’re nowhere near as common as _rejections_ , though.”

“And we’re in the middle of a city,” Justin sighed. “Where the water is all fed in through pipes and recycling systems.”

“I guess that idea’s out, then,” Lissa said.

“We can always just smash them,” Cleo said heavily. “They’re mirrors. They break. The danger is that if they attack you before you can smash them, then…”

The sight of poor Emery writhing in pain at the first subway station flashed through her memories. She shivered.

"Then they can turn you into a negaty monster.”

Lissa said to Justin, “That happened to one of the first people she met when she found herself here. They were attacked by those dog things and her friend got caught on their way to an escape.”

“I couldn’t bear it if that happened to either of you,” Cleo said. “If we can avoid the run-up-and-smash-them option, I would like to.”

“You said they turn excess positive energy into magic crystals when they change someone into a monster, right?”

Pose nodded.

“What if we sneak back to one of the areas where they’ve been and just gather up the crystals they’ve left behind? No interaction, just search and retrieve.”

The girls considered.

“That sounds like the best plan,” Lissa nodded. “Those things are really scary, though, Justin,” she said.

Cleo nodded. “On the plus side, they shouldn’t be able to affect me since I don’t have any magic left. Maybe I can distract them while you guys find and gather up however much magic you can.”

“That can be the backup plan,” Justin said. “Let’s not play that card unless we have to. Sneak first, distract later.”

The girls nodded.

There was commotion in the kitchen and the rest of the staff suddenly ran through the dining area and into the waiting lounge. There was a huge television there to keep guests occupied while they waited for a table. News was on.

The trio of friends stood and moved closer to see what the fuss was about.

On the TV, a reporter was indicating for a camera to zoom in across a street, through the entrance of a building, to where what looked like an upside-down, black and purple crater was erupting from a fancy ceiling. Dark, dripping hands on whisps that might have been arms were reaching through the hole in the ceiling, down to the ground level of the building – which appeared to be a department store – and grasping people and things. Everyone they touched looked to shout or scream, and then convulse in pain. Swirling black mist would emerge from the hands and engulf the person, and when it dissipated, a strange looking creature had replaced the person. When items or fixtures were grasped, they turned to dust and black mist that swirled away to join with the other conversions going on.

Cleo gasped. “They found me.”


	9. Without Balance There Is No... Strategy?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The kids form a plan to infiltrate the department store past the Negaty monsters and gather up the Posity crystals using Lissa's costumes. Some civilians set them off, though, and the group have to beat a hasty retreat. Back at the school, Cleo concocts a way to turn the costumes into cast members to help them. Balan shows up in a window reflection again, but something's wrong with him.

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 9 – “ …Strategy?”**

“That department store has a huge ceiling covered in mirrors right near the entrance,” Justin said.

“Then that’s how they’re using it to get here. Just like at the school costume room.” Cleo frowned. “But they were just _rejections_ before, not anything with hands or arms. That seems more like-” She cut herself off. “Oh, no. Someone got turned into a _Nega Boss_ – a stronger version of a _negaty_ monster.” She gulped.

Lissa and Justin both looked at her.

“You don’t think it was…” Lissa trailed off.

Cleo’s brows knit together. “I hope it wasn’t Emery, but unless we can get back to the carnival, there may not be a way to tell.”

“How do we stop a _Nega Boss_?” Justin asked, turning to watch the scene on the news again.

“Well, uh…” Cleo swept through her memories to try and remember. Everything was a blur for some reason. Did they disappear when Purr did?

“THERE!” Lissa blurted, pointing to the television.

Just for a moment, when the camera was trying to focus on one of the freshly created _negaty_ monsters, something twinkled blue in the background.

Cleo’s eyes went wide. “That’s it! Those are the crystals we need!”

“We can’t just go charging into that place without a plan,” Justin said. “I know some guys who work there, so I know the employee entrances and can sneak us into the building. Once we’re inside, though, we’ll need some way to fool them into thinking we’re not a threat.”

“Good thinking,” Cleo said. Then a thought occurred to her. “Hey, Justin?”

He looked over.

“Do we all still go to school together? And if so, is it nearby?”

Justin nodded. “It’s about five minutes away. Why?”

Cleo turned to Lissa, “Did your memories catch up with our current time? Because mine haven’t. If we still go to school together, then there’s a good chance you still make costumes, right?”

Lissa nodded. “Yeah, it’s weird. New memories have been seeping into my head while we were sitting here, and they just sort of… _fit_.”

“Good. I’m glad using the _trains of thought_ didn’t have as much of a bad effect on you as they have on me. Do you think we could borrow some of your costumes from the school?”

Lissa frowned in confusion for a moment, and then it became clear. “Oh! You mean to sneak past the _negaties_?”

Cleo smiled and nodded.

“Sounds like it’s worth a shot,” Justin said.

“Let’s do it!” Lissa grinned. “I can’t believe my talent is actually useful for something important!”

Justin clocked out of work early and let the manager know that he was in charge of his own place again. The girls borrowed a jacket and a hoodie from the lost-and-found, and then the trio set off quietly through the night’s drizzle. They stuck to the shadows and away from anything reflective. Any time they had to walk past a car window, Cleo would pull the hood of her borrowed garment around her face and avoid looking. The thought process was: _if I can’t see a reflection, then the reflection can’t see me, and the rejections shouldn’t be able to find me_.

They made it to the school without incident. The front doors were unlocked and, by some miracle of chance, all of the front entrance glass was coated in team spirit murals made of glass paint. Cleo kept her hood tight around her face and her head down, just to be safe.

Lissa led the way back to the room where all of her costumes were housed and started picking through them for things that looked monstrous like the beasties they’d seen on TV. While she did that, Cleo and Justin grabbed bolts of loose fabric and covered all of the dressing area mirrors to prevent _rejections_ coming through.

Once Lissa had found some costumes (a turtle-looking creature that was covered in spikes, a robot with springy arms, and a doll-esque mannequin costume which she explained was from a version of Pinocchio), the trio quickly grabbed some oversized garbage bags to protect the costumes from the rain outside and made their way through the wet streets, to the department store.

From outside and across the road, it looked like most of the _negaties_ were mulling around at the entrance near where they had been transformed. A few had wandered outside, and there was a police line set up and shouting at them. The beasties gave no heed to the police and continued to wander. If one came too close to a police car, shots would be fired near it, on the ground. The trio of kids happened to witness one of the _negaties_ (which looked like a wind-up-toy duck) coming too close to being hit. It responded by changing its expression to something ferocious and opening a normal looking beak into a gaping maw of jagged teeth. It charged at the police car closest to it and tore the hood off in one bite. Police scattered, people screamed, and anyone foolish enough to think they could stand around taking cell phone footage got clear of the area.

Justin took them around back and through a loading dock entrance. They ditched their plastic bag covers in a back room and slid the costumes on over their clothes. Then, they slowly crept out into the store’s first floor and tried to make their way to the front between racks and behind fixtures.

At one point they found a store employee, hiding behind a confections counter. When she saw their strange costumes, she almost screamed, but Lissa quickly removed the mask from her turtle costume and shushed the woman. They told her where they had come in from and how to get back out safely. Once the civilian was free of danger, the three friends moved on again.

At last they could see the giant crater in the ceiling that seemed to be erupting with black and purple fog. Tinges of neon pink lightning shot through it now and then. The long arms with dripping hands they had seen on television were no longer present, but black goo still seeped from the hole in the ceiling. The _negaty_ monsters under it were all making weird noises that suited their new forms, which let the trio know when one was nearby. For the most part, that made them avoidable. Hopefully when they weren’t avoidable, the costumes would be sufficient cover.

Lissa was again the first one to spot a crystal. It was in the main aisle near the jewelry counter. She pulled the mask for her turtle costume back on and waddled affectedly out like she was an oversized toy, muttering some noise that sounded like a fish glubbing. When she neared the crystal, she “accidentally” kicked it back toward Cleo and Justin, then wandered away the other direction.

Cleo scooped up the yellow gem and tried to follow along behind where Lissa was waddling by hidden behind clothing displays at the edge of the department.

Justin saw what the girls were doing and waddled out in his robot suit to head the other direction, making quiet beeping and booping noises. He picked up a small trashcan from the cosmetics area and began picking up small debris. He made it look as though he was simply cleaning up the area. Cleo tried to keep an eye on him from across the department in case her help was required. Justin didn’t seem to need it, though. He picked up anything he came across and deposited it in the small trashcan: rubble, stray items from the counter, and the gems that had been cast aside.

“I think we’ve almost got them all,” Lissa whispered as she waddled near to the edge of the clothing where Cleo was hidden. “I’m going to make one more pass and then call it quits.”

She wandered away.

Outside, another _negaty_ went berserk and began tearing into anything close. A street-side table was flung through the front glass. Cleo ducked her head, then quickly checked to see if her companions were okay.

All of the other _negaties_ who had been wandering around became jostled by the commotion and started attacking anything near them, like they were dominos that had been set off by the disruption outside. One of them doubled in size and stomped the jewelry counter. One’s mouth unhinged and it tried to gobble up a t-bar display rack of jeans.

Justin came racing across the back of the area. “Time to go!”

Cleo stood to look for Lissa. She hadn’t come back yet.

They spotted her coming their way, but the turtle suit was making it awkward. The body of the costume extended below the knees, making running difficult. A wolf-ish looking _negaty_ was berserking nearby and began flinging things off of a display of cosmetics. One of the displayers clipped Lissa’s head as she was waddling, and knocked her forward. The wolf beasty was too busy raging to notice, so Cleo and Justin raced out, slid under either of Lissa’s costumed arms, and hauled her away from the scene.

At the loading dock where they’d entered, they tore off their costumes and checked Lissa for injuries. She was crying from the pain, but there was no broken skin.

“If I were to guess,” Justin said, giving the back of her head a quick kiss, “You’re going to have a goose egg there in a little while. I’ve seen enough sibs tumble down stairs, into tables, off of furniture… You should be okay, but it’s going to make a lump. If you start to see double, or have blurry vision, you let us know immediately, okay?” He leaned down and checked her eyes to make sure they weren’t dilated.

Lissa nodded and sniffed.

“Checking for a concussion?” Cleo asked, gathering up the precious costumes and shoving them into the plastic garbage bags for safety against the weather.

Justin nodded. “Just in case.”

“Let’s get back to the school and see what we can do with these,” Cleo said, indicating the small trash can where all the gems had wound up. (She had added her and Lissa’s collection when they were fleeing.) “Can you walk, Lissa?”

Lissa nodded and got up.

“That was a brilliantly brave performance,” Cleo said, taking the others’ costumes so Justin could escort Lissa by one arm in case she _did_ get dizzy. “You should be proud.”

Lissa gave a pained smile of thanks.

“She’s right,” Justin said. “And we certainly couldn’t have gotten all of these,” he gave the trashcan a quick jangle, “without your awesome costumes.”

“Aww, you guuuuys,” Lissa laughed.

They made it back to the school safely and returned the costumes they’d used. Cleo took an inventory of how many of each color of crystal they’d managed to gather at the store. Lissa was showing wear and admitted to having a horrible headache. Justin told them to wait while he went to the nurse’s office for a moment to look for some pain killers.

Cleo frowned at the amounts she had to work with. “If I were Pose, I could make this work,” she muttered. “But in a _normy_ body, I… don’t know? I guess I can try it the old fashioned way? Lissa, do you know if there’s a mortar and pestle around somewhere?”

Her friend nodded, holding an icepack to the back of her head. “Down in room 103’s lab area, bottom left cabinet. I had bio there last semester. It’s one of the only cabinets that doesn’t have a lock because it’s got such old equipment in it.”

“Will you be okay for a moment?” Cleo checked.

Lissa nodded. “Go.”

Cleo hated to leave her friend alone when there could be nasty things lurking about, but she couldn’t redistribute the magic from the crystals in this form. She was going to have to break them down first and use an old song the previous gatekeeper had taught them when they first had to escape Wonderworld on their own.

As she walked, Cleo frowned, thinking. “Lissa was with me back then, at that time. _And_ Justin. Was… Weren’t there four of us, back then? And how come I didn’t remember this _before_?”

She stepped on something awkward and it pinged across the hall, before clinking against a locker. Cleo leaned down to pick it up. It looked like the same material as one of the magic gems but was narrower and the wrong color. It was a paler shade of pink and looked like it was part of a large and broken glass sculpture. There was still the possibility it was part of one of the gems, though, so she pocketed the shard and continued.

It wasn’t until her way back from retrieving the grinding tools that her mind started to wander to home and the familiar faces there. Would the others have finally woken up? Or would the lack of magic mean they would all permanently fall asleep and stay that way? The previous gatekeeper had never gone over such a circumstance with them when they’d signed on to run the theater. What would happen to all of the…

“ _Costumes_ …” Cleo said, dawning realization. “ _That’s_ how we fought a _nega boss_ the last time! We used Lissa’s _costumes_! We turned them into _cast members_ and they fought alongside us!”

The memories were vague and disjointed – she could only catch glimpses of them – but they were there!

There was another tink as she hurried through the halls and she again looked down. The lighter pink piece of gem seemed to have fallen out of her pocket.

“Oops! Sorry, thing.” She picked it up again. “Oh, I hope there’s enough to at least make some of the costumes work for us,” she mused out loud. “If we can get some of them powered up with this _positive_ energy, we should be able to at least defend ourselves to go back to some of the previous places and gather up more crystals there.”

She started to push open one of the double doors to the costume room, but inside, Justin was holding Lissa in his arms. It looked extremely intimate, so Cleo – as of yet unnoticed – backed out into the hallway, feeling horribly invasive.

“Awkwaaaaard,” she muttered to herself. “Uh, okay… How long do I give them, and how do I loudly announce I’m back without making too much of a ruckus? Two minutes? Five minutes?”

She paced up and down the hallway, forgetting that she was next to windows and needed to keep her hoodie up. It wasn’t until the third trek that she remembered, glanced, and saw she had no reflection.

At first, her stomach plunged through the floor. Previously, she’d seen her reflection as Pose even when no one else had. But now she was _no one_?

With shaking hands, she approached the window, hoping beyond hope that as she got closer, maybe a ghost of herself would meet her as she touched the glass. Against the dark outside, though, the only reflection was the rest of the hallway around her.

. . . And Balan sitting on the floor with his head back and eyes shut, breathing heavily through a frown. He looked exhausted.

“Balan?” Cleo said.

No response came.

“ _Balan?!_ ” she banged both hands on the glass.


	10. Without Balance There Is No... Confidence?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pose can't hear Balan through a reflection anymore. Is SHE coming apart, or is the theater? It takes a sacrifice of pride to use the posity crystals, but the kids finally get the costumes to come to life. It's time to head off to rescue Emery. What're the strange shards of pink glass Cleo keeps finding?

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 10 – “ …Confidence?”**

“ _Balan?!_ ” she banged both fists on the glass again.

The maestro’s eyelids cracked open and his pupils slid toward the glass for a moment. Then they shut again, and he slowly struggled to get up.

Cleo’s stomach crawled up her throat. “Are you okay?!”

Balan staggered a step, then the stage smile returned and he waved once, pleasantly.

“No, uh-uh, don’t give me that. What happened? Are you hurt?”

Pose thoughtlessly attempted to phase her arm through the glass, but it didn't work. She looked at her helplessly human appendages, remembered where she was, and slammed one fist against the glass.

Balan held his hands up in a calm-down gesture.

“Are you hurt?” Cleo asked again, quieter, more aware that no matter the answer, she couldn’t do anything about it.

Balan looked off and waved his arms in what might have been a wide shrug, but eventually one arm came back to a “so-so” gesture.

Cleo frowned, unimpressed.

Balan changed the “so-so” gesture into a “tiny bit” gesture, holding his index finger and thumb about an inch apart.

Cleo’s shoulders sagged and she leaned her forehead against the glass. “I’m sorry.”

Balan waved the whole thing off in a wide sweeping motion, but on the tail end of the movement he lost his balance and banged his head against his side of the glass. The smile faltered to a frown and he held both hands to his hatted head.

Cleo couldn’t help but give a small smile. She could practically hear the tiny whine of “Owwwww!” that would have followed such a _faux pas_.

Which made her realize something.

“Hey… Can you hear me?”

Still holding his head, he nodded a little.

“Have you said anything?”

Balan frowned more and looked up, but didn’t appear to say anything.

“Are you talking?” Cleo asked.

He nodded slowly.

Cleo took a step back from the glass. It wasn’t just that she didn’t have a reflection, anymore, it was that she couldn’t hear things from outside of Wonderworld, too! Or…

“Wait, can I not hear you because _I’m_ coming apart, or because _you’re_ coming apart from overextending however much magic you’ve got left?”

Balan stood up, concern on his face, now, instead of pain, but still no response came.

Cleo sighed and looked away. “This isn’t good. No matter which answer it is, it isn’t good.” When she looked back again, the director had gone back to rubbing his head, looking distant. The exhaustion had returned to his face.

“Balan?”

He looked through the glass again.

“Can you hang in there for a little while longer?”

He gave a mild shrug.

“I’ve,” Cleo paused and bit her lip. “I’ve put a lot of people in harm’s way by coming here. Back in the first world I went to, some _rejections_ got to a boy who was helping me. He was really nice. I need to go back and save him.”

She motioned at the closed double doors to the costume room. “Lissa and Justin are willing to help, some. I feel like they might be people from my past life and I just don’t remember them so well, but I know in the fibers of my being I can trust and rely on them. So, we’re going to go back to the carnival and rescue Emery.”

Balan’s tired brows rose.

“Maybe when we get there, I can find more discarded crystals. Once he’s safe, I’ll come help you. Can you hang on that long?”

A tired smile took over his face and he gave a single nod.

Cleo gripped her hands into fists and pressed both of them against the glass again, once more resting her forehead against the lack of reflection. Her long-time friend returned the gesture, rumpling his prized hat to rest his own forehead against the glass from the opposite side.

“I’m coming,” Cleo said, then backed up, turned away, and strode toward the double doors, mentally ramping herself into a fighting mindset as she went.

This time when she entered, Cleo found Justin and Lissa pulling possible costumes from the racks and laying them out on the long tables.

“Are you alright?” Justin asked.

“You look… angry, I think,” Lissa said.

Cleo shook her head as though to indicate it was nothing and held up the mortar and pestle. “All good. What’re you guys up to? And how’s your head?”

“I’m alright, thank you,” Lissa said, though she still looked pained. “We’re trying to decide which outfits would most help if we were to go to a carnival and need to blend in.”

“Smart,” Cleo said. “Can you do me a favor?”

Her friends nodded.

“Can you also look for ones that would… I don’t know… Be able to somehow fight off some of those beasties we saw before? Like, the robot with the springy arms was good! But we saw the turtle was hard to walk in. Maybe something that can move easier?”

Justin frowned. “No one said anything about fighting those things. We’re doing search and recover on those magic crystals – that was all.”

“I know,” Cleo said, “And yes, that’s still the plan. I just… Can you just find some that look like they would fit the bill? I have an idea.”

Justin looked about to protest again, but Lissa said, “I’ve got just the thing.” Then she said to Justin, “Can you give me a hand? The one’s higher up.”

He nodded and they disappeared down a long aisle of costumes.

Cleo grabbed the trashcan full of crystals and sat down on the floor. Any normal gemstone probably wouldn’t have been crushable in such a way, but this was Wonderworld, and Cleo knew the trick to getting them into a manipulative state.

“If I were a proper _normality_ ,” she muttered, “You might only be good for things like creating benign little _posity_ creatures. But I know what you’re capable of,” she said to the bowl of shards that were gradually becoming tinier. “I know if given the proper alignment cause, you guys can really pull off some amazing stuff.”

The pieces were pretty tiny, now. Not quite salt crystal sized, but getting there. Talking to them was helping break them down. _But to get them into the proper state, I need…_ Cleo sighed. “A song.”

She paused and stared at the bowl of pieces in front of her. They’d started to glow in a mixture of blue, pink, and yellow.

“Alright… Yes, they’re worth my pride.” She took a great inhale.

“ _Joy and sorrow, doubt and pride,_

_All are found as one, inside._

_When the balance bends and bows,_

_Then the self, one overthrows._

_Come back._

_Come back._

_Bring the broken, make it whole._

_Come back._

_Come back._

_Mend the body, mind, and soul._ ”

She’d still been grinding away at the crystals while she sang quietly, but on the last line, a ghost-wind pulled the now powdered crystals into the air, took them in a quick swirl around Cleo, and then slammed them through her chest at her heart. She gasped at the pressure making it hard to breathe, but was otherwise unhurt as the magic phased its way through her chest and out at her back, reading her heart as it went. It looped into several glittering rings around her in a giant continuous loop, expanding and contracting with each of her heartbeats.

“I need your help,” Cleo grunted around the pressure. “One of my friends was attacked by a _rejection_ and has become a _nega boss_. I need to get him rebalanced.”

Lissa and Justin came back from their trek for costumes while Cleo was still leaned over the grinding bowl, apparently talking to thin air. They both startled back, wide-eyed, at the display of magic swirling around her, though.

“No, I know I’m not a _juxtapose_ anymore,” Cleo said, responding to a conversation no one else could hear.

She was quiet for a moment more, and her two friends exchanged nervous looks.

“Well, be that as it may, he needs your help! Isn’t it your job to balance things positively?”

More silence. Lissa slipped her hand in Justin’s.

“I _don’t care_! He can be an imbecilic jerk the rest of forever, for all it matters, but right now _he needs our help_. They _both_ do.”

Quiet.

“I already gave up the last shred of pride I had when I asked for your help. I can’t do this alone. I don’t…” Pose thought back to in the hall when she’d attempted to phase through the glass without thinking about it, and failed. “I don’t remember how. I’m broken on my own. I need Purr back. I need help.”

Longer quiet.

Lissa and Justin exchanged another look.

Cleo nodded. “Understood. Thank you.”

The rings of glowing crystal bits around her burst apart, spread into their different colors in the air, and circled around the room. Strands of it would trail off here and there to wrap around individual costumes. A fire fighter costume came to life, then a butterfly, a flower, a train, a parrot, a sheep, a spider, a bulldozer, a frog… A dozen costumes came to life, blinked cartoonish eyes awake, and jumped to their feet, looking like kinder versions of the _negaty_ type of monsters that had been at the department store.

And then the trail of gem dust pulled the three costumes out of Lissa and Justin’s arms and glitter-ified them. One moment, the three costumes were floating in the air getting the magic treatment, and the next moment they disappeared into colored blue, yellow, and pink fog. Each went to a different one of the three friends, and solidified around them, fabulously better than they were before.

Lissa, Justin, and Cleo each took a moment to examine themselves.

Justin was wrapped in a newer version of the dragon costume Lissa had shown Cleo before. Its wings worked like additional appendages and allowed him to hover where he had previously been standing. He spun his head once and on the come-around, twin fireballs erupted from the dragon’s nostrils and burnt dark spots on the tile floor.

Lissa was in the snowman costume with the bunny earmuffs. She held her arms up and explosions of snow burst from her sleeves like lava from a volcano. She whooped and cheered and showered a portion of the room with snow, before firing a snowball at the charred spot Justin had hit with fire a moment before.

Cleo looked herself over. She had a variation of a cat costume with over-sized ears, a tail with a spike-ball on its end, and claws on her gloves that had to have been the length of her fingers. Purr had a fondness of cat costumes. Cleo grimaced at it and said, “The irony is not lost on me. Consider your sense of humor marked, magic.”

Then she turned and took in the group all around the room. Cleo grinned over at Lissa. “Your craftsmanship really lends itself to being earthshattering. You ought to consider ditching the accountant career path and take up theater permanently.”

The friends laughed.

“Now let’s go crash a carnival! _To the subway!_ ”

Everyone whooped and cheered, and headed out the door.

Cleo brought up the rear, making sure everyone got out safely. The reflections in the hallway glass were back to normal – Balan was gone, and she had a reflection while wearing the costume.

“It’s weird,” she mumbled to herself. “I feel like we’ve done this before…”

Another _tink_ sound came from the floor. That piece of crystal that was the wrong color pink seemed to have fallen out of her pocket again. She scooped it up and felt through the costume for her own clothes and the pocket she’d kept it in before. To her surprise, there were two pieces there. This new one made three. Cleo took them out to have a better look. They looked like they might have been part of some faceted glass stem or tube. It was a shame she hadn’t remembered them when she was grinding the rest into powder, but there would be time later on. They had more crystals to find, yet.

She pocketed the strange things and continued after her friends and the living costumes.


	11. Without Balance There Is No... Memory?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cleo's memories are slowly coming back from when she was a normal human. Justin battles a negaty monster. The Nega Boss seems to be gathering up minions. Lissa asks Cleo what it's like being split into two people - like Balan and Lance.

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 11 – “ …Memory?”**

Perhaps it was because everyone was wearing costumes coated in magic from the crystals they’d collected, but the whole mini-company was able to enter the subway without issue. This time Lissa saw how other random people at the station seemed to just disappear when they entered the subway cars. She shivered as Cleo caught up to her.

“I see why you were so worried the first time we hopped a ride,” Lissa said.

Cleo nodded. “But now we’ve got a new problem. I don’t know how to make the train go back to previous stations.”

“Might I make a suggestion?” Justin asked.

The girls nodded.

Justin pointed to a large, sideways light-switch above the still open subway car’s doors. The side it was inclined to had a forward-facing arrow lit up next to it. He reached up and flicked it the other direction. A backward-facing arrow lit up instead.

Cleo sighed. “Fair. The first time I rode this thing today, I was only about this tall,” she held a hand up to indicate the approximate height of her tween self. “I never looked up.”

“Oh, _that’s_ a thing,” Lissa said, turning to Justin. “If we’re going back to a different stop, our ages are probably going to change. That’s why I was surprised you looked different when we met up at the restaurant.”

“Ah,” he nodded.

“ _Thank you_ , before I forget,” Cleo added, waving at the switch.

The doors shut and the group set off.

In the artificial light of the ride, most everyone was quiet. Cleo’s thoughts wandered. First, she worried about the theater. It was still a mess. What if guests showed up while it was like that? Balan wasn’t really in any sort of condition to handle the workload alone. Maybe the others had woken up by now? Maybe Inish was handling things – he usually pulled janitorial duties, though when there was a lot to do, he would dole out specific tasks to the others. He was pretty good at managing people when he needed to be. That was probably why he was the stage manager. And Incor would probably be running the numbers the moment she woke up and her party-headache wore off.

. . . Unless they’d all been adversely affected by Cleo’s trip into Wonderworld, too. She swallowed a lump in her throat and thought back to how worn-out Balan looked. What if using magic to send Cleo to Wonderworld had completely drained the entire company? Would any of them be able to wake up, or would they just start to fade away like forgotten dreams? Like the previous gatekeeper?

Cleo hugged herself and tried to think of something else while they rode. The first place they would come to on the return trip was going to be their school when they were all in 9th grade. There was a possibility that the _rejections_ would still be running around, but at least now they stood a chance at fighting them off. Justin had made a fair point, though. They ought to try and retrieve as many of the crystals thrown off by _negaty_ creatures as they could first, before engaging in a fight of any kind.

She set a hand across her mouth, thinking. _I’m sure we’ve done this before. Not quite the same, but it’s like déjà vu. Lissa and Justin and Me and… Was Emery there? Did he go to school with us?_

A fleeting memory crossed her mind. The four of them were sitting and laughing at a lunch table in a school cafeteria.

Cleo’s world shifted and she almost lost her balance. _He WAS there!_ _Was he not there this time because of what happened at the carnival? Is that why things seem familiar but not quite right, because I fouled up their natural progression when I lost my notebook?_ She sat in one of the subway’s seats and held heavily onto one of the upright poles. She was dizzy from trying to remember, but now that the flood gate of memory had opened…

She thought back more. She could remember the first day of math class, when she’d met Lissa. The girl had been a math genius, but so shy! They complimented each other lovely, because despite the awkwardness, Cleo was more outgoing. The shy girl had explained about their classmate Justin, who she’d been crushing on since middle school. Cleo had two classes with him, and so managed to work her way into his circle of friends, bringing Lissa along for the ride. When they’d progressed to the next grade, none of his friends had the same lunch period, so Cleo had arranged for herself, Lissa, Emery, and Justin to all eat together. She’d been thrilled that Emery had the same lunch as her, finally, but wasn’t sure quite how to act around him now that they were older. He was still the greasy-headed skater boy that she’d grown up friends with, but now, well… Other people their age were dating. Was Emery date material, or did he still fall into the friend zone? It was easier to just do a group lunch, and let the fact that the four of them easily fell into being friends carry them through the school year.

“Hey, are you okay?” Lissa asked, sitting down with Cleo. “You’ve got that look again. Like you’re either mad or really concentrating on something.”

Cleo heaved a sigh. “My memories are starting to come back, but they don’t line up with this version of existence. It’s weird.”

Lissa nodded. “I noticed that. But I think it’s because of the situation with positive and negative magic you were talking about. Like, maybe when _that’s_ resolved, things will go back to normal.”

Cleo stared at her friend. “You’re not afraid at all? Of losing what you’ve learned?”

Lissa shrugged. “I mean, a little…” She looked longingly across the train car at Justin, who was watching out the opposite side’s window. “I don’t know if I’ll remember how close we were, if things go back to normal, but…” She trailed off, then tried to cover obvious sorrow with a smile. “But I’m grateful for the experience. Maybe I _will_ pursue a career in theater next time. It’s sure been much more fun than math homework.”

Cleo didn’t know why, but she felt like crying again. She hugged Lissa. “How come you’re so strong, and I was the one who told myself I was going to be strong for you guys?”

Lissa laughed. “No one can handle everything on their own. It’s no fun being alone, Cleo.”

That gonging sensation slammed into the inside of Cleo’s head. Balan had said the very same thing to her when he’d sent her away on this trip. Vertigo hit and hit hard, or maybe the train swung a curve, because Cleo suddenly found herself on the floor.

“Ohmygosh! Are you okay?” Lissa asked, trying to help Cleo up.

She held her head with one hand and the floor with the other, swaying for a moment on her knees. “I’m fine… Sorry. Lost my balance.”

On the floor in front of her were several small shards of lighter-pink crystal.

 _Did these fall out of my pocket? There haven’t been any_ negaties _on the train._

Cleo picked them up and reached for her pocket, but once again found that the previous ones were still there.

“What in the world _are_ these things? And where do they keep coming from?” she mumbled.

Lissa examined the pieces in her friend’s hands. “They look like pieces of a broken sculpture.”

“A crystal sculpture?” Cleo asked, not convinced.

“Glass, maybe,” Lissa said. “Glass is fragile. Like people’s hearts. _Beautiful_ , granted, but easily broken.”

Cleo paused and looked at her friend for a long moment, then back at the pieces. “You might be on to something.” She arranged the pieces she had. Some of their edges fit together perfectly, like they _had_ been part of one whole thing at some time. The pieces she had formed a sort of checkmark shape, with a slight curve to it.

“This is important, but I can’t remember why,” Cleo said.

The subway came to the middle station and stopped.

The girls got up and Cleo pocketed the pieces.

“Alright, gang,” she said to quiet the group. “This is a search and retrieve mission. We’re gathering up as many _posity_ crystals as we can, and then meeting back here. The _rejections_ came from the costume room, through to the main lobby, and followed us here to the subway. They probably will have attacked anyone they met along the way. It was lunch time back then, so the school would have still been populated. That said, there is a high chance we’ll encounter _negaty_ monsters. TRY not to engage unless it’s a matter of self-defense. We don’t want to chance them hurting anyone.”

“What if we come across those _rejection_ things?” Justin asked.

“If they attack you, they can turn you into monsters, too,” Cleo said. “Don’t give them the chance. If a _rejection_ comes at you, attack it first. You’re equipped to deal with them now, thanks to Lissa’s awesome costumes.”

The mini-company left the subway station and found that the rain here was a steady downpour.

“Once we’re inside we’ll be okay,” Cleo assured. “The magic ought to keep the costumes protected from most elements.”

They crossed the wet street to the campus and headed for the lobby. Between the rain and the later hour, it was dark, so the school’s interior lights were all on. The main windows were still missing from where they had shattered out the first time the girls had escaped. From a distance, Cleo spotted something that made her call the others to a halt.

Inside, from the ceiling of the main lobby, another of those void portals had opened. The edges of it were still bubbling and rumbling with dark purple miasma and bright pink spurts of lightning. The dark, dripping hands were here, on long, noodle-like arms that reached out of the void and picked up any _negaty_ monsters that were in the area.

“Weird,” Cleo said, quietly. “At the department store, those things were creating _negaty_ monsters. Why are they gathering them up, here?”

“Change of tactic?” Lissa asked. “There’s no police at this location like there were at the store, either.”

“Count your blessings,” Justin said. “That thing is clearing a path for us.”

Sure enough, there were a few dozen _negaty_ monsters in the lobby, but as they watched, hand after hand came down out of the void portal, scooped them up, and took them away.

“Just to be safe,” Lissa said, “let’s go around to the side entrance and cut across the back of the auditorium. We didn’t go that way the first time, so the _rejections_ shouldn’t have caused any damage there.”

“Good thinking,” Cleo nodded.

They made their way around the building in the wet grass, slipping as they went, and got into the school from one of the back ways. The hallways were empty; no students and no monsters. They started in the back hallway by the costume room, gathering up all of the _posity_ crystals they could, and made their ways forward. They didn’t encounter anyone or anything until they finally got to the lobby.

Cleo, Lissa, and Justin peered around the corner from the hallway. There was one angry looking book monster, the size of a person, marching back and forth in a waddle. In one hand, it carried a spear. In the other, a sword. It looked like a rejected Alice in Wonderland card that might have worked for the Queen of Hearts.

“I guess in a school people fear book work?” Lissa asked, uncertainly. “So, it turned someone into a book?”

“How do we turn them back?” Justin asked.

“Defeat it,” Cleo said. “Destroy the excess _negaty_ energy and it’ll revert to its normal form.”

“Will hurting the monster hurt the original person?” Lissa asked, looking nervous.

Cleo shook her head. “It only hurts the negative energy when it’s attacked. It works like a shell.”

“Nothing for it, then,” Justin said, breaking from the group.

“Justin!” “Wait!” the girls said over each other.

He didn’t, though. Flapping through the air with the wings of his dragon costume, he approached the book monster while it was pacing the opposite direction. He whipped his dragon head around and blasted the book with a double fireball.

The book monster tumbled forward, then shivered and went into angry-mode. Its arms became whirling dervishes, twirling its sword and spear.

Justin used his tail to knock away one of the weapons and blasted the huge book with another duo of fireballs. The blast knocked the second weapon away.

The girls started to race out to the lobby after their friend to help, but before they could reach him, he’d blasted the book monster with a third set of fireballs and reduced it to a smoking mess. It flopped back on the floor and blue fog swirled off of it. A sleeping person was left where it had been. The blue fog solidified into a floating _posity_ crystal nearby.

Justin snagged it, landed gracefully on the floor, and grinned back at the girls. “Piece of cake.”

Lissa raced up and hugged him. Cleo shook her head, smiling.

“Dangerous to go alone, but well done.” She clapped him on the shoulder.

The rest of the animated costumes came out after them and gathered up all of the stray crystals from around the lobby. While they did, Cleo was careful to keep an eye on the void portal above them, to make sure no more arms came through.

“It must have left just the one monster here as a guard,” she guessed, when Lissa broke away from Justin and came over.

“Should we, um…” Lissa looked up at the portal and gulped. “Go that way?”

Cleo shook her head. “Not yet. Let’s prep those other crystals first. Back to the costume room.”

The mini-company moved to this version of the school’s back room and Cleo performed the song for changing the _posity_ crystals into magic again. This time, the crystals didn’t grill her about her cause. It wasn’t clear why – maybe because she was already wearing a costume powered by their brethren. There were now about four dozen costumes alive and kicking, as well as a few pieces of stray scenery that had been stored in the costume room. They had their own small army.

“Time to head out?” Lissa asked, as Cleo finished changing the last of the crystals into magic.

Cleo was breathing hard, but nodded.

“Ohhey, are you alright?” Lissa frowned.

Cleo nodded. “Winded is all. They’re not quizzing me on my intentions, but they’re still passing through to be sure.” She patted her chest, by her heart. “It’s heavy, is all.”

Justin had come up while they were talking. “Why don’t we take a short break, then? The place I teach dance has another dude who teaches karate. We were comparing moves one day and it turns out our styles aren’t that different. I can make sure everyone here knows how to fight without their special abilities, just in case. You can grab a quick rest.”

Cleo was overwhelmed with gratitude. “That’s… _awesome_. Thank you so much!”

Lissa grinned. “Here, there’s some really soft velvet I was planning to use for a ball gown. I’ll throw it on some upholstery foam and you can snooze on that until you’re ready to move again.”

“Aw, you guuuuys!” Cleo laughed.

The trio broke. Justin started calling for the company to fall in for instruction and Lissa escorted Cleo to a changing area where she started to arrange a pile of fabric and cushions.

“Hey, um, Cleo?”

“Yeah?” She was leaning tiredly on a dressing chair.

“What’s it like being a _juxtapose_?”

Cleo thought for a moment. “Not too different from being human, I guess. Just, your priorities change a little.”

“Is it hard getting used to?”

Cleo flopped into a sit on the pile of cushioning. “Not really. The magic becomes second nature pretty quick. At least, it did for me. What took some getting used to was having torn thoughts on things. At all times, you’re two different people. Part of you is contained in one person, with one set of likes, dislikes, and special talents, and the other part of you manages everything else. You can try to shift aspects from one person to the other, but they both gravitate toward natural strong parts. That’s what’s hard for me. I have trouble loving both of them. I get caught up in one of them’s moods and start to ignore the other one’s. Then it swaps. I can’t ever seem to give them equal parts of my heart. And when I’m so wrapped up in worrying about myselves and how to keep my head on straight, it’s hard to keep in mind that I want to worry about my friends and how they’re doing.”

Lissa smiled and hmmed. “Maybe you just need to take a short vacay once in a while.”

Cleo laughed. “Maybe that would do the trick.”

“Let your mind relax and just worry about living for the moment.”

Cleo yawned. “That’d be nice.” She laid down and sighed.

“I’ll come check on you shortly,” Lissa said. “Rest well.”

Cleo curled up in a ball on the nest of fabric. She’d done everything she possibly could, she knew, but still felt like it wasn’t fair to stop and rest. People still needed help: the theater, Balan, and…

 _Poor Emery,_ she thought. _He didn’t need to get mixed up in this. He was such a good friend for so long…_

Her brows furrowed and she thought about that. _For so long? How long did we actually know each other?_

Her consciousness slipped away and dreams brought memories back she hadn’t thought about for years.


	12. Without Balance There Is No... Happiness?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asleep, Cleo remembers how things ACTUALLY were before the Balance Theater. It seems like she'll know who she is now, except when she arrives at the final memory, she refuses to keep going. Something bad happened to Emery that she doesn't WANT to remember, and it changed them all... for good.

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 12 – “ …Happiness?”**

Cleo plodded along in near twilight. It was late. The closer she got, the sicker she felt. She’d brought a present and a card. Did boys even like cards? He would probably laugh at the stupid idea. He would probably laugh at her for getting lost. And then laugh more for the wreck she looked like, now that she’d traversed half the city in one of her nice outfits, sweated it up, and mussed her hair.

The house was half of a twin. It was tall and kind of old looking. The yard needed a trim.

Cleo swallowed a lump in her throat and knocked at the door.

A lady on the shorter side of average answered. She had glasses and frizzy hair that looked to have been dyed too many times, until she’d given up and was letting gray come through from the roots.

“Hello, there,” she said kindly.

“Is…” Cleo swallowed again. “Is this Emery’s house?”

“Oh! Yes – goodness – come on in, dear. I didn’t know he’d invited company!”

Cleo’s face went horribly red. “He didn’t. I probably should have asked before coming. I didn’t think. If it’s a bad time, I can-”

“Oh, no, no, no, dear. Here, why don’t you go on through. Just right through the kitchen and out to the back.”

Walking through someone else’s house was surreal. Smells that were alien. Evidence of lives lived differently from hers. Cleo was aware from letters that Emery had two other brothers and a sister, though none of them were present just now. Cleo’s own house was always kept pristine and clean. This house looked like, with so many kids, the mother had a hard time keeping things tidy _or_ clean.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Cleo said. “I hope I haven’t disturbed dinner or anything. I hadn’t expected it to take so long to get here, you see, and-”

“Oh, don’t you worry about that. Tonight’s pizza night. They always come late. I’ll give you kids a shout when food’s ready.”

Her easy way of speaking lent to Emery’s skater slang. It wouldn’t have been too far of a jump from one to the other.

The mother led Cleo to what seemed like an additional room out the back of the house. It was complete, and decorated like a family room, with television and two couches, but the lighting was vague, like the room had been forgotten.

Flopped across the one couch, with a video game in his hands, was Emery. He looked up tiredly but brightened when he saw Cleo.

“Yo! Where’d … When… _How did you get here?_ ” he blurted.

“Oh… I took the wrong bus, got lost in the city, and had to ask directions three times at seedy little gas stations. It was quite a terrifying experience.”

The mother, who had yet to leave, let out a gasp of exclamation and hugged Cleo around the shoulders.

Emery sat up a little straighter. “You didn’t get a ride?”

“Because _that_ would have gone over so well. ‘Mom, can you give me a ride to a boy’s house halfway across town because I want to bring him a get-well-soon present?’ The questions would never end, and the trouble would have been worse.”

Emery’s mother burst out laughing and released Cleo. “Oh, I like you, dear. You can stay. I’ma go check on the laundry – it should be done drying now and I don’t want it to wrinkle.” She excused herself.

Cleo stepped through the mess of discarded take-out bags and empty soft drink cups.

“Sorry. If I’d known you were coming, I would have cleaned up a little,” he laughed, face red.

Cleo raised a brow. “Oh? You don’t look like you’ve moved from that spot for several days.”

“I get up when I need to use the bathroom!” he protested, face going redder. “And, y’know… to shower and stuff…”

“In a cast?” Cleo asked, skeptical.

“Er, well… I have to wrap it in tons of plastic bags, but…”

She laughed and shook her head. “I can’t imagine the difficulty of trying to do such a thing. Here,” she stood from the previously unoccupied couch and reached her box across the small room to him.

It didn’t seem likely his face could go any more red than it was, receiving a gift from a girl. “Thank you.” He pulled the card open awkwardly. The front had a skateboarding cat on it, trying to jump over a box, but on the other side of the box was a sleeping dog. The inside showed the cat in a hospital bed, having apparently been chomped up quite a bit by the dog it landed on and a sympathy verse. Emery laughed at it. “Nice.”

Cleo shrugged her thanks, starting to turn red herself. The card had not been laughed off in mockery, but laughed at in proper entertainment. Success.

Emery opened the box. Inside was a batch of homemade cookie bars. “Oh, wow! Are these all for me?!”

Cleo nodded. “Oatmeal and Peanut butter with chocolate frosting. Per specification.”

Emery’s eyes went wide. “I mentioned that _once_! And that was _eons_ ago!”

Cleo went worse red. “Well… I pay attention when baked goods are involved,” she shrugged.

He set them aside and held his arms out. Cleo responded to the gesture without really stopping to think about it – it just happened automatically. She stepped across the small room and gave him a hug. And there they stayed for a moment. When they parted, they couldn’t look at each other, for realization of what had just transpired. Cleo sat on the opposite couch again.

“So… You’re moving soon?” Emery asked.

Cleo nodded. “I’ll be in _this_ school district in the fall. We’re supposed to start the moving process in two weeks.”

His smile widened. “It’ll be nice to be able to see you more than just in the middle of summer at Gram’s place.”

Cleo nodded.

“I’m getting a cell phone next month, for my birthday!” he suddenly exploded. “I can text you, finally!”

Cleo couldn’t contain the return smile.

“And maybe you can come to some of my games!” Emery bubbled more.

“That would be fun,” she nodded. “But you’ll have to explain to me how it works again. I’m afraid I have difficulty retaining things to do with sports.”

Emery grinned. “With pleasure.”

They spent the rest of the evening talking about everything and nothing. The mother came through at some point and brought out a large pizza with two slices missing. Apparently, they’d ordered several and the sibs had gotten to the food first. The kids ate and continued talking without any realization of how late it was getting. It didn’t occur to either of them until almost nine when Cleo’s phone buzzed that a new episode of one of her favorite webcomics was up. She had a small breakdown about having missed the scheduled bus to get her home, but Emery’s mother swooped in and said she would give her a ride. Cleo explained about the distance, and how it would be too much trouble, but the mother wouldn’t hear anything of it, saying that she was just glad to see one of Emery’s friends who _wasn’t_ a pestilential skateboarder or roller-blader.

The mom disappeared to go get her shoes.

Cleo stood and gathered up her purse.

“Hey, Cle?”

She looked over at her friend.

“Would you, uh… sign my cast before you go?”

She smiled and grabbed a marker off an end table. “Think you’ll be back on your feet by the time school starts?” She knelt down next to the couch and looked for a clear spot. Some of his other friends had put very artistic graffiti all over most of it.

“I hope so,” he said. “Otherwise I won’t get to show you around on your first day.”

She laughed, capped the marker, and moved to stand, but Emery snagged her hand. Their eyes locked for a moment.

“Thank you very much for coming to visit.”

Cleo smiled. “Get better quick.”

He let her go and she made her way to find the mother by the front door.

*****

The next moment, Cleo found herself in one of the home ec rooms of the high school, running from station to station. All kinds of bowls, implements, and ingredients were strewn everywhere. Her favorite brown and pink cat-print apron was smeared with what looked like flour, batter, and chocolate. It was getting late and she was panicking.

Emery came through the classroom’s doorway. “Yo! I got a text that you never showed up at the study group for finals. So, I asked around and was told you were here. Whatchu doing this late?”

Cleo turned a hectic face to her friend and handed him an empty cupcake tin. “Can you put papers in this, please?”

“Sure, but what’s all the fuss?”

She was about to verge on tears. “I messed up my timing. I got so wrapped up in a personal writing project that I didn’t leave myself enough time to work on the food for the dance tomorrow.”

Emery struggled to separate the paper liners but eventually managed. “You can’t seriously think you’re feeding the whole school?”

“The student council thinks I am,” she said.

“ _What_?!”

“I signed up to do the food table months ago and they never bothered to get anyone else to help. I guess they thought I would delegate? But I didn’t, so now it’s just me, and I’ve only got tonight, and tomorrow, and this is never gonna get done!” She was trying to fill an oversized pan of miniloafs with batter, but she bumped into a nearby bowl which clattered loudly to the floor. She jumped at the racket, then just stood there for a moment, hands shaking, staring at it. Cleo carefully set down the bowl full of batter she was holding and reached for some paper towels.

Emery made it to her before she got them and started cleaning it up with paper towels from the station he had been near. “At least that one was empty. This looks like it was just splatter from old remains.”

Cleo put the bowl in one of the nearby sinks and grabbed a napkin for her face.

“Hey, hey,” Emery threw the used towels in the trash and wrapped her in a hug. “It’s alright.”

She just sobbed on his shirt. “I’m sorry. I’m a wreck right this moment.”

“I got that,” he stroked her hair. “I got that. Just relax a minute. Catch your breath. Find your cool. It’s okay.”

The part of her consciousness that knew she was dreaming thought, _He really was a good friend. Why didn’t I ever ask him out?_

After a moment, Emery let go and went to the room’s fridge to dig around for a loose soft drink can. He came back with two and handed one to Cleo. She thanked him and leaned against the counter for a moment to partake. He let her calm down some more and pulled out his phone to check something before pushing the perceived issue.

“Okay, so… Do you have a list of what needs done, or no?” he asked, then slipped his phone away.

Cleo nodded and retrieved a clipboard from a different station. It, too, was splattered with stray ingredients. “I’ve got four trays in the oven and the first one’s timer will go off in another ten minutes. I was hoping to get this lot done next,” she motioned behind herself to the bowl she’d been divvying into the mini-loaf pan, “and then move on to the next one, which is what you were setting out liners for.”

“Okay. I _can’t_ bake,” he said, very enunciated, “but I can follow instructions. You tell me what to do, and I will help as much as I can.”

She nodded.

“One thing at a time. No racing,” Emery said. “Whatever gets done, that’s gonna be good enough. No fussing over what can’t get done. Okay?”

Cleo nodded again. She finished filling the mini loafs, popped them in one of the stations’ ovens, and then grabbed a different bowl of batter. She brought it over to where Emery had finished putting liners in one tin and was starting on another.

“After these are in, the next thing is cookies. I’ve got a market bag by Station 3 full of mixes. When the liners are all done, can you pick one and tell me what ingredients it needs? Some of them only need water, butter, and eggs. Others need oil. And if it’s anything with chocolate chips, they never have enough, so I always add extra.”

“ _You_ make things from pre-fabbed mixes?” Emery laughed.

“Only when I’m in a rush,” she sighed.

Lissa and Justin hurried into the room.

“Oh, thank goodness you’re okay!” Lissa said.

“Wait, but, you guys have finals to study for!” Cleo said.

“I told them the situation,” Emery held up his phone and gave it a waggle.

“You should have told us you needed help,” Justin said. “I’m not so hot in the kitchen, but if you had too much to handle, we could have come to help sooner.”

Lissa hugged Cleo and then brushed some of the mess off of her cat apron. “Just tell us what to do!”

Cleo smiled at her friends and started to dole out instruction.

*****

Justin, Emery, and Cleo sat together in the third row of the school auditorium. The house lights were still up, even though the production should have started five minutes prior. The school’s lead drama teacher came out on stage, apologized for the delay, and explained there had been an unscheduled set back but they would begin in a moment. The three friends exchanged looks and slipped out the side doors.

In the hallway beyond the backstage area, which led to the green room, hair and makeup area, and costume room, Lissa was trying to adjust a costume on someone who looked about to be sick.

“What happened?” Justin asked.

Lissa looked up, anxiety all over her face. “Some of our extras were carpooling here together but got in an accident. One of them just called to let us know that’s why they’re not here. He said they all think they’re okay, but they have to go get checked out at the hospital just to be sure. We only have a few stagehands we can spare for the first scene, so we’re trying to alter the costumes to fit real quick. It won’t be enough, but we’ve got to make it work.”

“How many do you need?” Emery asked.

Lissa started to answer, but then the guy she was fitting threw up all over the front of his outfit. She grimaced and said, “ _Four_ more.”

“Perfect,” Cleo said. “Tell us where to costume up. You’re coming, too.”

“You can’t be serious,” Lissa said.

“We’re rescuing your show, now show us what we’re wearing!” Emery laughed.

It took another full five minutes, but the director quickly briefed the friends on what they were to do, when, and quickly ushered them all out with the rest of the cast.

Cleo was fine until she got out in the hot lights, then she felt like she might throw up, too. But Lissa needed them. They were only extras, after all. It wasn’t super difficult. They could pull this off for Lissa’s sake.

Well… they were SUPPOSED to only be extras. There was supposed to be crowd movement going on in the background, and Emery sort of hammed it up, drawing entertained laughter from the audience.

After the scene, the friends disrobed and returned to the audience to watch the rest. Lissa had to stay behind to help people switch into and out of costumes. Afterward, though, when they went to congratulate Lissa on the production, the director snagged Emery and wouldn’t let him go until he promised to join the drama group. Emery’s only stipulation was that his hockey came first, and he couldn’t participate if it would interfere.

That was in late 9th. By senior year, Emery with his flare for the dramatic was as much of a fixture in the drama group as Lissa was with her costumes.

 _That’s right_ , the sleeping part of Cleo’s consciousness thought, _we all started shifting toward new hobbies or pass-times._

As they got older, Lissa continued to be in charge of the costumes department, but she made fewer and fewer of them herself, instead letting new students take over. She spent more hours tutoring than sewing.

Justin, who had loved his modern dance classes at the community center, gradually stopped having time for them when he had to get a part-time job.

Cleo baked and volunteered less, and wrote more. She considered it a relatively private thing, and wasn’t quick to show her writing to any of her friends, but it made her more attentive in English classes and her attention to grammatical detail surpassed most everyone in her grade.

Emery was the only one who stuck with his love for hockey. The drama group was definitely a new passion, but his love for hockey never diminished. Juggling the two became harder, though, as the years went on.

High school came and went. Lissa went to an ivy league school and became an accountant, like her parents had wanted. Justin was promoted time after time until he was a regional manager, in charge of several districts of a chain of stores. Cleo found a pattern that publishers wanted and started turning out New York Times Best Sellers. They weren’t what she wanted to write, but at least she was writing for a living. Emery made it big in the minor leagues, but on his first tryout for the majors, he had a bad accident that wrecked his leg. Coupled with the numerous breaks he’d had from skating in his youth, his doctors forbid him from skating again, lest he destroy his leg permanently. Cleo had tried to be a comfort at the time, but he wasn’t receptive. He switched from being passive about the ordeal, claiming that he didn’t care and was planning to go back to school for film production, or being aggressively angry about it, shouting that he would get better on his own if the doctors wouldn’t help him. He refused any support his friends tried to give him, even Cleo when she’d shown up on her own one night to just talk about how close they all used to be, and hadn’t been in years. He’d snapped at her and she’d gone home in tears.

None of the four spoke for a long time after that. They heard _of_ each other, through social media, but they never seemed to cross paths, or find time to check-in on the others’ wellbeings.

 _We drifted apart_ , she thought. _And if I recall, we were all miserable. How did we all end up in Wonderworld?_ She thought she could remember, but it was sketchy. _There was a phone call, wasn’t there? And someone said…_

“You were the first number in his phonebook.”

Cleo’s stomach lurched and she woke up, pain surging through her chest so bad that she rolled over and threw up on the costume room floor. She was dizzy and alone, surrounded by vomit and shards of pink glass.


	13. Without Balance There Is No... Success?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The kids head into battle against the Lovecraft-esque Nega Boss. Teamwork saves Cleo twice, but the third time...

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 13 – “ …Success?”**

Lissa came back in as Cleo was just finishing shoving the last of the glass shards into her pocket. “Ohmygosh, what happened? Are you alright?”

Cleo stood on wobbly legs and Lissa took her arm. “Fine. Bad dream.”

“How did you not get anything on your clothing?” Lissa asked. “Here, come on. There’s a bathroom right next door, and a water fountain. You can get that taste out of your mouth.”

Cleo felt cold and shaky. It was a first responder who had called her back then. They had found his phone unlocked next to him. She didn’t want to think of the rest.

Since she was in the school’s bathroom she shoved her head in the sink and let water run over her face. _Wake up! Wake up! You were dreaming. None of that matters anymore. It doesn’t matter anymore._

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Lissa asked.

Cleo grabbed some paper towels and dried her face. “Lissa,” she said. “How much do you remember?”

“What do you mean?”

“How far into our future do your memories go?” Cleo asked.

“Uh…” Lissa looked thoughtful for a moment. “At some point it gets a little foggy…”

Cleo studied Lissa and tried to piece things that were missing from her own memories together. “I remember growing up. I remember losing touch with everyone. But then I feel like a chunk is missing.”

Lissa’s eyes saddened and she nodded. “I remember losing touch. I suppose… part of what I’ll miss when this is over is that the first time around, Justin and I never got together.”

Cleo’s thought process derailed and changed to considering her friend’s situation. “Yeah. And that’s a shame. You two were perfect for each other.”

“So were you and Emery,” Lissa said sympathetically. “Why weren’t any of us braver?”

Cleo shook her head. “We were safe as friends. We worked well as a group. To move forward would have endangered that, maybe. So we, what, stagnated? And then drifted apart?” Her shoulders slouched. “I missed you guys so much, but I was terrified that if I called you would all be mad that I hadn’t bothered with you for years.”

Lissa nodded. “Me, too. I would get so caught up with my own things, I would be exhausted and just want time to myself. Then every now and then I would realize I missed you guys, but be too ashamed of how little attention I had paid to work up the nerve to send a text or email.”

Cleo hugged her friend. “I promise I won’t be an idiot next time.”

Lissa hugged her back. “Me, too. I promise I’ll help however I can, whenever I can. So don’t ever think you can’t call me – even if it’s just to vent or rant.”

For a moment, memories of being Pose, curled up in a dark corner of the theater wishing she had someone to vent to crossed her mind. It was enough to bring her resolution back. She stood and wiped her face off with one last paper towel.

“Time to go kick some _nega boss_ butt?” Cleo asked.

Lissa smiled. “Let’s rally the troops.”

“You _really_ make the best costumes in the world,” Cleo laughed as they headed back out.

*****

With all of the animated objects in tow, Cleo, Lissa, and Justin set out for the subway station again. The _train of thought_ was sitting there waiting, but this time there were no extras flitting about. It was strange to Cleo how (now) she knew exactly what they were. They were background characters, like the friends had played in the production they’d helped Lissa with. So, were Lissa and Justin just background characters in whatever production Cleo had found herself dumped in the middle of? Or was there some other explanation? Had Balan conscripted actors on short notice? But wait, that wouldn’t account for Emery, who had been there from the start. Had the production staff helped? Were they the actors? That might explain why everyone was missing that morning in the theater, when they ought to have been awake. But who would have played each role? She couldn’t quite picture any of the staff as a 100% perfect match for Lissa, or Justin, or Emery. To play rolls that were so close to Cleo’s own heart, whoever was playing them deserved an award for getting them so spot on.

Which painted the conversation with Lissa from the bathroom in a different light. If it _wasn’t_ the real Lissa, but just some actor playing her for Wonderworld’s purposes, then the promise of having one another’s back, which ought to have been extremely personal, was now known by some outsider, to whom it wouldn’t mean anything like the weight it carried for Cleo. Either she was a fool for believing the farces playing her best friends, or she was a fool for needing people to play them in the first place. Probably both. Which did not help her feel better. It made her feel angry, and used. Wonderworld was _using_ her memories and painting them on other people for some purpose she couldn’t wrap her head around.

Which then raised the question, was the Emery she was on her way to rescue even real? Was there any real danger to the memory? Or to whatever actor might have been playing him? Or was it all just imagined worry that was part of a pre-scripted setup?

She had so much anger all of the sudden. How dare Wonderworld use her memories like this. She would get Emery back just to SPITE the damn place for trying to use him against her. How _dare_ Wonderworld think it could use her friends. Or even the _memory_ of her friends! The audacity! The disrespect! Yes, she would show Wonderworld who was boss. She would save all of her friends, or the memories of her friends, and she would treasure them where they belonged, how they belonged – properly. She wouldn’t allow this stupid world to make sport of them anymore.

If there was one good thing to have come from this trip, though, it was the excess _posity_ magic floating around. Once the adventure was over, she ought to at least be able to send it back to the theater. They could make use of it there.

 _Wait… The_ posity _magic here is real. Which means the_ negaty _impact we’re facing is real. So those_ rejections _were real._ IF _there was a script in play…_ she thought, _then it probably got disrupted when those_ rejections _showed up. Which means either my memory of Emery, or the actor playing him, actually_ IS _in trouble. Now I’m REALLY mad at this stupid world for letting creatures like_ rejections _even exist to trouble travelers!_

The subway train slid to a stop. While the carnival’s station had been bustling with extras the first time around, they were all absent, now.

“Eyes and ears open, everyone,” Cleo said.

The three friends went to the top of the stairs and peeked out into the night. The school had been experiencing a steady rain, but here it was a torrential downpour. The clouds flashed with neon pink, purple, blue, and teal-green lightning, and thunder boomed across the fairgrounds into the empty country-scape outside of its boundaries. The fear was so tumultuous that Cleo thought she might throw up again. She took a moment, and a deep breath, and remembered what she was here to do. She owed it to the memory of her friends to do right by them this time. She was _going_ to save Emery – even if he was just an actor playing a part. Then she would tell this world to take a hike and give her life back.

Down the pathway, between the entrances for rides and tents, for games and vendors, some _negaty_ monsters from the department store were wandering toward the direction of the house of mirrors.

“Those crazy arms must have brought them here,” Lissa said.

The trio crept along behind them at a safe distance, their sound muffled by the heavy rain. The animated company of costumes and props followed a little further behind, waiting for a call to action. They made their way through the mostly deserted carnival grounds until they came to a wide-open area where it seemed like tents and other temporary buildings had been burned down. All of the _negaty_ monsters from the department store, and the school, and what looked like they could have been created right here at the carnival, were all gathered here, mulling about. The wreckage could have been caused by them, but it seemed more like they had gathered at the behest of what was in the middle of the area, at what used to be the house of mirrors.

The storm had focused the worst of its winds there. When neon-colored lightning flashed, it became momentarily clear that there was a large creature emerging from the house of mirrors’ roof, as though it had been born there and grown until it burst out the top and didn’t stop until it was several stories big. If the building housed its lower portion, its belly was a mass of clouds spinning like a tornado that went straight up until a more solid-looking torso occurred. From out of the clouds, dozens of tentacle arms flailed. Each ended with a clawed, black hand, that dripped black goo. The chest and arms appeared to be the remains of a tattered, purple trench coat – the back of which flapped out behind it like a cape in the angry rain. The head looked like some kind of mutated cross between a traditional-looking dragon’s snout, on the head of an angry rooster, with hair like the arms of an octopus. The whole thing was dark-colored, blending in lovely with the night, except for glowing scrawl all over its body. The same neon colors that were flashing in the sky whenever lightning struck were traced all over the creature like strange tribal tattoos.

Then Cleo remembered where she’d heard a similar description before.

“It’s based on a Lovecraft-type of monster, from fiction,” Cleo said to her companions.

“Any ideas on how to beat it?” Justin asked.

“Not a clue. I guess we just wail on it,” Cleo said.

“That might be hard. It’s got a living shield,” Lissa pointed out. She indicated the ground all around the open circle area. There were _tons_ of _negaty_ monsters rambling about. Every now and then, a _posity_ crystal would pop up – probably trying to escape how much negativity was floating around the place.

“Remember, the _negaty_ energy acts like a shell to those people. Defeat the monster and the person will go back to normal,” Cleo said.

“And what about once they’re normal?” Lissa asked. “They’ll be sitting ducks for that… _thing_.”

“She has a point,” Justin said. “Lissa, why don’t you assign some of the cast to rescuing the civilians and get them away to a safe distance?”

She nodded.

 _The cast?_ Cleo wondered. _Have I called the costumes ‘the cast’ in front of these two?_ _I would have if I were Pose, but…_

“Us three have the best offensive right now, because we can think fast on our feet,” Justin continued. “If the plan is just to beat the ever-loving-day-lights out of this thing, then let’s divide and conquer. Spread ourselves out.”

Lissa snapped her fingers. “At least two of the costumes are variants on witches and wizards! I’ll get them to try using spells to protect us while we move!”

“Okay, you go dole out instructions,” Justin said. “We’ll wait one more minute before starting the-”

One of the _negaty_ monsters spotted them and shrieked. Any others near it turned, saw the friends, and also started shrieking. Their _benign_ monster forms became _angry_ monster forms. Claws grew, teeth lengthened, tails and mouths and spikes and hammers and anything that could function as a personal weapon became bigger or badder than it had been before. And the _nega boss_ looked down on them with a deep growl.

“ _Attack!_ ” Cleo shouted.

The cast surged past her in a mad charge to engage the _negaties_. Cleo lost track of Lissa and Justin. Instead, she focused on heading straight for the boss monster, determined to keep its attention focused on her and away from her friends. She’d done this before, she knew – she just couldn’t remember the details. And if she was still alive to tell the tale, now, that means she survived it the first time – so there was a good chance she would survive it this time.

She hadn’t fully tested the abilities of the costume Lissa and the _posity_ magic had given her before. In the guise of a pink and brown cat, she had a feline’s heightened agility. In one leap, she was on top of the house of mirrors’ awning, and then climbing with her extended claws up until she could jump to its roof.

The boss let out a battle-cry roar of its own and lifted itself up out of the house of mirrors. Its entire lower half was more of those octopus tentacles, around rhinoceros-like legs – each one as thick around as the width of two or three cars. It spun, sending tentacles in every direction, knocking down friend and foe alike. Many creatures cried out. Some were silenced.

Cleo leapt at one of the flailing limbs and dug her claws in. She managed to hold on until the creature’s spin finally stopped. When it came to a relative stand-still, she let go and began racing up toward the torso. She slipped twice, thanks to the rain making surfaces slick, and the wind buffeting her from all sides. On the third slip, she actually fell off. Her heart raced and she twisted her body to land with all limbs down, like a cat.

Lissa saw her fall and used her snowman costume to blast a loop-de-loop of snow and ice into existence. When Cleo landed on it, she was at the top of a curve. She slid completely around the loop and the momentum threw her back up to just beyond where she’d been before. She snagged another flailing tentacle and continued her climb.

Peripherally, she saw a cannon prop being lifted by a helicopter costume which fired on the _nega boss_. A praying mantis costume leapt and flew, making slicing swipes as it went. Something else fast went by on another arm, with a different costume riding on its back that shot spinning gears from what looked like pop-guns.

The boss roared again, deafening the entire area, and began slamming its tentacles down sharply to knock things off of itself.

Cleo hated to think of the fate of any poor creature unfortunate enough to be underneath one of those arms when it slammed down. She dug her claws in tight and tried to ride out the tantrum, only a few feet away from the creature’s back.

When it stopped again, the wind had finally done her a favor. Part of the tattered purple coat was flapping nearby like a giant tarp. She took a flying leap toward it and snagged the thick material with all four of her cat-paws.

Head-tentacles came down angrily, trying to swat at her and other costumes and props that were making their ways up the boss’s back. One came dangerously close to knocking Cleo off, but Justin swooped in with his dragon costume and blasted it with fireballs.

Cleo raced to climb again before something else could go wrong. She made it to the back of the beast’s neck and crawled her way free of flailing head-tentacles until she’d found a part of exposed neck where she could attack safely. And attack she did. She sliced with her costume’s sharp claws, drawing out black ichor and purple miasma. The _nega boss_ didn’t seem like it had anything under its skin – it was just a giant accumulation of void.

A great hand closed around Cleo. She’d been so busy attacking, she hadn’t noticed the arm reaching around from the other side. She hissed and clawed and bit at it. The _nega boss_ gave a shout and released her sharply. She began to plummet for a second time that evening, but it never occurred to her to fear for a horrible, potentially fatal landing. There was too much at stake to think about things like that. And too much adrenaline to worry. She started swiping at anything she passed – the sleeve of the arm as it drew back, the purple coat tatters, the body tentacles…

But then the other hand swooped in and gripped her tighter than before. She yowled in pain as her arms and ribs were compressed.

Someone shouted, making Cleo finally pay attention to the scene around her. Which is when the hand released her, and she found that this time she wasn’t falling to splatter on the ground far below, but into a gaping mouth of darkness, full of jagged teeth.


	14. Without Balance There Is No... Use?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cleo tries to remember what happened at the hospital. Lance has some choice words for her before demanding her mask and resignation. A purple jester visits the kids - now grown up - at the Emergency Room.

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 14 – “ …Use.”**

She disembarked at the city’s subway stop for the general hospital. When she arrived inside, Cleo was told he was still in surgery. With shaking hands, she finally texted Lissa and Justin. She hadn’t talked to any of them in years. They both said they would get there as soon as possible.

At some point a nurse came out and asked who she was. Cleo lied and said she was Emery’s sister. The nurse explained the situation as she had been told it – it was a driver’s side collision. His direction had been green, and if he was going normal speed, that meant between 45 and 50 miles per hour. The other driver was coming from a perpendicular street and never stopped. _He_ came out with a bruise. _Emery_ was lucky he wasn’t killed on impact.

Cleo threw up.

 _That’s why I threw up when I woke up_ , she thought.

The nurse assured her that surgery was going well, and they should be able to let her back to see her “brother” soon.

Cleo sat in the lobby alone, shaking, with a cup of water from a cooler, a box of tissues, and the trash can. She couldn’t stop crying.

*****

There was one glowing piece of glass in front of Cleo’s eyes when she came around. It was tiny, and the only light source in an otherwise bleak area. There was nothing to be seen anywhere around but dark.

“I guess you’re just a fragment, huh?” she said, stiffly gathering herself up. Her chest ached at her sternum. Her costume from Lissa was missing – she was in civilian clothing again, though her age wasn’t readily determinable. She started to pull the other pieces out of her pocket, but they blew out of her hand on a ghost wind.

“Hey!” Cleo jumped and made a mad grab for them, but found she hurt more when she tried to move quickly. Everything hurt. Like she’d landed pretty hard and everything was either really badly bruised or else sprained. She tried to grab at them anyway.

The swirled into a tiny tornado over a hand and illuminated a figure that was holding them as they started to assemble into a proper glass-heart shape.

“Lance! Oh, thank goodness!” Cleo sighed and pulled her arms back against herself to try and work out some of the muscle pain. “Is Balan alright?”

In the glow from the glass heart, Lance looked pink and black. His face was normally passive or unimpressed by the world – the polar opposite of Balan’s eternally amused demeanor. At the moment, though, he had a lip curled up in apparent annoyance.

“ _Now_ you wonder about that?”

Cleo flinched. “H-hey.”

Lance shook his head, “You couldn’t even complete this thing?” he slightly lifted the glowing heart, floating above his palm.

“Ah… about that,” Cleo said, leaning forward against the aches and pains. “I need to help Emery. I guess I- Oh… I got eaten, didn’t I,” she said – less as a question and more as a realization.

Lance grimaced and tilted his head down in skepticism.

“Damn,” Cleo said, let down. “That’s no good.” She stared at the floor, thinking.

After a moment, she looked back up. “Are Lissa and Justin doing okay?”

Lance frowned worse and put one hand on his hip.

“Can you help them out, for me?” she asked.

“Is that what I _do_?” he hissed.

Cleo winced. “Sorry. It’s just… They’re all really important to me. I don’t want either of them to get hurt, even if they’re only memories. And I don’t,” sharp pain went through her chest again, “I don’t want Emery to be stuck in that monster forever.”

Lance shook his head, disgusted disbelief all over his face. “You really don’t remember, do you?”

Cleo raised her brows in question. “I seem to be missing a lot of memories.”

Lance jostled the glass heart again. “Looks like you got _enough_. You’re only missing one really important one to be able to get out of here.”

“Then I can still save Emery?!” she brightened.

The disbelief increased. “This isn’t _his_.”

Cleo frowned. “What? Sure it is! He’s who I’ve been trying to save. The _rejections_ got to him and turned him into a _nega boss_ , so I’ve been trying to-”

“CLEO!” Lance shouted. “HE’S NOT A GUEST, HE’S AN ACTOR!”

She flinched again, not sure what to make of that.

“He can be removed from the scenario when this production closes. _You_ , however, are walking a thin line.”

“But… the _rejections_ …”

“Were an inconvenience, yes, and made things worse, but not beyond control. We didn’t plan on them, but they’ve been handled.”

“Then…” Cleo looked down again, really wishing the pain would stop. “Can you at least take the _posity_ crystals back to the theater and help Balan? Some good may as well come out of this.”

“See, _this_ is why you’re so poisonous and I should just walk away and not let you back in.”

“Now, hold on!” Cleo said, finding some of her fight. “I didn’t just roll over and die! I made friends! I stuck together with and trusted them! I realized I fouled up the first time around by _not_ keeping them as close as I could have! So don’t go calling me poisonous!”

“ _You took Purr away!_ ” Lance exploded.

There was quiet for a moment.

Cleo sadly said, “So, you were _one more_ who liked her the best, huh?”

Lance growled, red in the face. “You were on a path to take yourself out of the picture, too. We found your torn-up attempts at resignation letters.”

Cleo shrugged. “What good is a writer who can’t write?”

“We _needed_ you!” He threw his free hand out in a wide gesture. “At this rate, Inish, Iative, Incor, and Porate may not even come back! They’re starting to think like _you_! And you want me to let you back into the theater without all of your memories,” he gave the glass heart a slight, angry shake, “so you can hurt Balan like you hurt me?!”

Cleo stared at him. Now she realized there was pain in his expression and she hadn’t noticed it before. That was the cause for the anger.

“Two things,” she said. “You and… _Purr_?” she asked.

Lance scoffed and glared away.

“And I’d never purposely hurt Balan. He’s too nice. Everyone loves him.”

“Forget it. You’re no good to the company if you can’t remember anything, anyway. You’ve become too _normal_ ized. Just give your mask back, and you can go home.”

“My… mask?”

“Yes, your mask. Just give it back. We’ll manage the theater without you. You can go home.” Lance shoved his free hand forward, open.

 _Home…?_ _Isn’t the theater ‘home’? Didn’t I give up my own home to go with…_

*****

When a different nurse finally led her through the ER to an intensive care unit, she found Emery in various casts and packaging-like bandages. His head was even wrapped in gauze. The part of his forehead that was sticking out was a gash with staples in it. One eye was bruised and swollen under a mess of torn up skin. An oxygen mask covered the lower half of his face.

Cleo cried. She sat by his side and the nurse left. She wanted to hold his hand but wasn’t sure of the wrappings around his fingers. He seemed to be fast asleep, anyway. A heart monitor was keeping a quiet rhythm on his other side. As minutes passed, she eventually leaned over onto the side of the bed and brushed a hand against the one part of his cheek that wasn’t damaged.

“Hey. If you can hear me, I’m here. I won’t go away until you come back.”

A heavy exhale, followed by a wince and a cough was the response. Cleo’s heart jumped into her throat.

“I was worried you were Mom, back from the dead to scold me.”

Cleo burst out in fresh tears and hugged him as best as she could without causing more pain.

Emery whined – so apparently it _did_ cause pain – until she released him.

“I thought you were dead!” she sobbed, and kissed his bandaged forehead.

“I thought I was, too.” He heaved another deep breath. “Can you stay? It hurts to talk.”

“I’ll stay. Rest. I’m just _so glad_ you’re alive.” She hugged him again, then sat back in the chair next to the bed and rested her arm over the bedrail, next to his hand, to be a presence. “I’ll stay.”

“Thank you, Cleo.” He shut his good eye again and appeared to nod off.

The night wore on. They both slept. At some point, Cleo became aware of voices, but couldn’t pull herself out of exhausted sleep fully. She knew Lissa and Justin had arrived, but couldn’t get her eyes open enough to get her head up and greet them. Then there was more quiet.

Then there wasn’t.

There was music – pleasant and light. A glow came from the doorway to the room, but outside wasn’t the rest of the emergency room ward, it was a grassy green hillside. Windmills floated on chunks of rock in thin air out in the distance.

 _What in the world?_ Cleo had thought.

Emery got up. He wasn’t wrapped in bandages or casts, and he didn’t appear to be hurt at all. He just sat up out of the hospital bed and walked over to explore the door.

Cleo shot after him and snagged his hand. “You’re not leaving me, again!”

He grinned. “Okay.”

“What’s going on?” Lissa asked, sleepily.

“Something different’s out there,” Emery said. “I wanna go see what.”

Justin said, “Then we’re all going. You’re not ditching on us again.”

Emery just grinned over his shoulder at his friends.

 _That was the start of it_ , Cleo thought. _I only wanted to see him smile like that, from then on. Anything to keep that smile on his face._ _Losing his hockey career had hurt him so much. I just wanted him to be happy._

They’d found themselves in Wonderworld. The friends had traversed many worlds, through many different doors, and found that no matter the time that had gone by, they still had an unbreakable bond. They fought monsters created from their own fears and doubts. They rescued creatures that were adorable. They had eventually come to the end of their journey and promised that no matter how things went, they would never leave each other to deal with a problem alone, again.

And then they’d found the way out. The gatekeeper, a purple-clad jester, showed them to the theater’s exit. But they’d seen he was starting to fade.

 _Just like Purr faded,_ Cleo thought.

They asked after his well-being and he confided that he was old, and it was time for someone else to take charge of things. Someone responsible enough to run the show, but with enough fun in them to make sure guests would come out better than they went in. The balance had to be protected. People’s hopes and dreams had to be protected.

Emery didn’t even give it a second thought before volunteering. His friends tried to fill in the logical “Have you even considered [blahblahblah]” questions, but he countered them all. There was no dissuading him. The theater at the edge of Wonderworld was where he wanted to stay.

“Guys, this is where I got my life and my friends back. I’ve been going downhill for years. If I can give that back to someone else who needs it, I will. Did you guys even know I was coaching a little league in my spare time? Nothing is better than seeing the looks on those kids’ faces when they succeed. Imagine what we could do with a place like this.”

Justin laughed. “Well, you did always have a flare for the dramatic.”

“Can I stay, too?” Lissa asked. “I would love to work in theater for a living. I haven’t sewn in _years_.”

“If you’re staying, I’m staying,” Justin said, taking her hand.

Emery looked hopefully to Cleo.

She smiled. “I’ll stay. It’s no fun being alone.”

The gatekeeper removed its mask and held it high over their heads. It burst into flame, split into four colors, and calmed into four different colored theater masks. Each showed half of a happy face and half of a sad face.

“I can only show you the door. If you choose to walk through or not, is up to you,” the previous gatekeeper had said.

One by one, they’d each donned their masks, and split into _juxtapose._ The previous gatekeeper shook hands with the new director, they exchanged polite bows as though at the end of a production, and the old gatekeeper went back through the door with the green grass and floating windmills. The door disappeared; the torch had been passed.


	15. Without Balance There Is No... Pas de Deux?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With her last memory back and her heart restored, Cleo returns to the battle and summons some posity creatures to help. Lissa and Justin have to decide if they're going to return to the theater, or go back to a normal life. Poor Balan takes an ear beating for the scheme he set up, but at least things are back to normal.

** “Without Balance There Is No…” **

**Chapter 15 – “ … _Pas de Deux_.”**

Cleo held her hand out in front of her and the last shard of pink glass materialized there. The heart Lance had been holding left his hand and flew to Cleo’s, where the last piece fit itself into place.

Lance let his arms fall to his side. “So, you _do_ remember.”

“Not everything,” Cleo said. “Only up to a certain point. I feel like I’m missing pieces from once we were all living at the theater.”

He nodded. “You _normalized_. You probably won’t be able to access all of those memories in that form.”

“We need to stop this,” Cleo nodded up and around herself.

Lance shook his head. “It’s bigger than just you, now. Lissa and Justin have to decide for themselves if they’re coming back or not.”

Cleo shoved the glass heart at Lance. “Then I’m going out to help them. Keep an eye on that, please.”

“I could turn it,” he said, quietly. It was a test of trust.

“What would it benefit you?” Cleo asked. She had bargaining power, now, and knew it. She knew who she was. “Guard it, please. I’ll be back. It’s no fun being alone.”

She turned and walked into the darkness. Cleo was pretty certain she would emerge in the house of mirrors, and sure enough, in a moment, loud roaring and stomping were audible, and she bumped her head against a glass wall in the dark. She felt her way along the wall until she found the door and let herself out.

Outside, the battle was still going on, but to a lesser extent. The number of _negaty_ monsters flitting about had diminished. Some of the poor costumes lay flattened on the ground, soaked with rain and lifeless, their magic drained. A look around told her Lissa and Justin were still fighting, but were moving slower – probably worn out. The giant monster was moving slower, too, and there were multiple wounds all over its corpus. Tears, or holes in its skin showed through to the black nothingness that was the _negaty_ energy keeping it whole.

Cleo understood properly how to counter it, now. She had her memories back.

She picked up a nearby _posity_ crystal and hummed a tune. It melted in her hand, and she held it over a huge puddle of rainwater. It was _live_ water.

“ _Come back. Come back,_ ” she sang quietly. “ _Heal the broken, make it whole. Come back. Come back. Mend the body, mind, and soul._ ”

Glowing with dim light, a shape rose out of the puddle. When it was about knee-height, it shook itself and the form clearly became feline. Around the area, other puddles began absorbing stray _posity_ crystals and birthing feline water-beasts of their own.

“My friends need help,” she said to the feline closest to her.

 _And you?_ it asked, in a language that wasn’t really a language – more of a series of vibrations in its water-body.

“I will do what I can,” she said.

The _redemption_ creature reached out a paw, so Cleo reached out a hand. When they touched, her battle costume reappeared, restored. She turned to face the giant monster again and leapt. All of the water-cat creatures leapt with her.

They clawed, they tore, they bit. Limb after limb of the creepy octopus monster fell and dissolved into black and purple smoke in the rain. Lissa and Justin seemed to gain a second wind at the sight of Cleo and the cluster of _redemptions_. The costumes and props that were left all cheered and fought harder. They removed one of the large creature’s arms. Any place where the _redemption_ cats attacked, the monster’s outer layers started peeling back into nothingness, and the _negaty_ energy at that place would start dissolving into black bubbles and foam, then mist.

Together, they damaged one of the legs so badly that the monster fell. The other arm was crushed under it, but was on its way to dissolving, already. Three of the costumes worked together to lash the beast’s giant mouth shut.

Cleo approached it and stared into the red eyes, full of rage.

Lissa came up beside her. “Do we have to actually… you know… _kill_ it?” she asked, uncertainly.

“Not this time, I don’t think,” Cleo said.

Justin set down in his dragon costume. “What then?”

“Fellow felines?” Cleo called.

The _redemption_ cat creatures rallied around the beast. One by one they each let out a yowling cry, until it was a cat chorus of noise. Black and purple smoke steamed off of the monster as the rain hit it, and it cried out in pain as what remained of its body began to dissolve.

“Ohmygosh,” Lissa said, hands flying to her mouth.

“Relax,” Cleo said, wading into the fog as it drifted away from the site of the beast. “This is a process. I left an anchor in it before I came back.”

“You… What?” Justin asked, squinting.

Cleo glanced over her shoulder at her friends and smiled. “I’m a writer. I do my homework. I remembered how to backdoor these things.” She reached into what would have been the monster’s neck, if it had been solid, and seemed to grip something in the fog.

The cats continued to “sing” in their cat chorus until the end of the excess _negaty_ energy had finally receded and left behind two things – the glass heart Cleo was holding, and a boy whose one arm was slung through it like a life preserver. Though, he himself looked to be passed out.

“Found you,” Cleo said with a small smile. “And I won’t go away until you come back.”

Emery coughed and seemed to wake himself. He let go of the glass heart and collapsed backward into the mud.

The _redemption_ cats started to meander away. Some of them disappeared back into puddles, others into mist. Their work was done.

“Did you have fun?” Cleo asked, kneeling down in the wet mess. Her pants would likely be ruined.

“What?” Emery asked.

“You’re a jerk and a manipulative bastard,” she said, smiling. “So, did you have fun?”

Emery laughed tiredly but didn’t sit up from lying in the mud. “Do you have any idea how hard it’s been keeping up three personas, minding _you_ all, and minding the theater, too? I need a week’s vacation!”

Cleo grabbed his wrist and hauled him into a sit, so she could hug him. “Well then next time, _don’t send us all into Wonderworld_!”

“I didn’t send _all of you_ ,” Emery said, too exhausted to protest the show of affection. “I only sent _you_. They just decided to follow.”

Cleo raised her brows and looked back at Lissa and Justin. “Ah. I should have realized who you were.”

She stood up and tried to pull Emery up with her, one of his arms slung over her shoulder.

“Are you going back?” Emery asked Lissa and Justin, looking worried.

“Well…” Lissa rubbed one of her arms with the opposite hand. “We won’t be the same if we go back…” She looked up at Justin.

“But we could be something new,” he offered. “We may not have ever tried to make being a couple work before, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try, now.” He held a hand out and his theater mask materialized in it. It was the one the gatekeeper had given him. “What say you, Lissa my love?”

Lissa smiled ear to ear. “I say you’re the best partner anyone could ask for.” She held out her own hand, where a different colored mask appeared. Together they slipped their split-expression theater masks back on, and seemed to disintegrate into gold and silver sparkles. Those swooshed back up into two new beings where previously there had only been one.

Inish and Iative were clad in their stage manager and choreographer clothing, one bland and boring, the other colorful and lively. Beside them, Incor and Porate were dressed in their accounting business-dress skirt and boldly-colored costuming jacket. One of each had on a sad looking theater mask, and the other of each had on a happy theater mask. They took the masks back off and let them disappear.

“Time to go home?” Inish held a hand to Porate.

She nodded back and took his arm like an escort. “Time to go home.”

The duo of opposites – one bland-looking and one bold and colorful – headed out of the clearing of damaged buildings toward the subway entrance.

Iative and Incor shyly held hands and followed, also an odd mix of bold and boring. Though, Incor turned and smiled back at Cleo briefly, making a victory symbol with her free hand.

“I guess opposites attract?” Cleo said with an amused shrug.

Emery made a waving motion with the hand that wasn’t slung over Cleo’s shoulder for support. “I wouldn’t know anything about it. I’m just a silly skater who fell for a prissy missy from the city on an August evening in my youth.” He grinned at her.

“You’re always so dramatic,” Cleo rolled her eyes and held her own hand out to summon her mask. “They’re right, it’s time to go ho-”

Emery kissed her.

The rain had settled into a tired drizzle. The few remaining costumes who still had magic were following along after the only obvious _juxtaposes_ in the area, heading for the subway. The _rejections_ and _redemptions_ were all gone, since balance was restored.

Cleo stood there a long time, holding Emery and kissing him back.

“I’ll never get you to admit this happened, will I?” he said, when they finally parted.

“Depends which one of me you ask,” Cleo smirked.

They put their masks back on together, and the last semblances of their normal lives were left behind.

“Oh, did I tell you we had guests show up while you were out?” Balan asked, brushing off his showman suit and straightening his white top hat.

Pose’s eyes went wide as she adjusted the coat for her power suit. “ _What_?!”

“Don’t worry! Don’t worry! I handled everything just fine! A darling set of kids, really.” He was back to gesticulating widely as he talked.

“He split himself more times than is healthy,” Lance grumbled. “That’s why he was so tired every time you two caught up.”

“ _It was fine!_ ” Balan shot. And then to Pose, in a more assuring voice, “It was fine.”

“Are the kids okay?” Purr asked. She looked not quite sure of herself and kept trying to smooth out the wrinkles on her multi-layered skirt. The drizzle was making her big hair stand out way more than usual.

Lance shifted, annoyance returning to his gestures. “The kids are going the rounds through Wonderworld as we speak. Managing everyone on limited staff was not easy.”

“I’m _so_ sorry,” Purr said, hugging him.

Lance’s face went terribly red and he looked away. “Yes, well…”

Pose said, “No _wonder_ you were so exhausted!” and thwacked Balan in the upper arm. “What’s the matter with you?!”

“Ow!” He rubbed his arm and looked injured.

“Don’t do that, again! It’s dangerous to run yourself that thin! Next time, get help!”

“He kinda couldn’t,” Purr interrupted.

“Shut it, girl!” Pose growled.

Balan laughed a proper laugh. “Oh, I missed you two bickering.”

“JERK!” both girls shouted at him.

“You deserved that,” Lance said.

*****

It took just shy of a week for Pose to turn out a full manuscript. She passed it to the director and producer over brunch. It was the only meal the boys knew how to cook and not burn – so Purr let them have it. While Pose sat full of anxiety, Balan and Lance went over the script. Purr kept politely refilling coffee and tea, and trying to quietly clean up the mess the boys had left during food prep without being super-distracting. Both girls were clearly nervous and antsy.

Every now and then, Balan would laugh out loud at something in the play. Lance remained passive, as always. When they finished (at the same time), Lance’s brows rose in what could have been surprise or relief. Balan, on the other hand, frowned across the table at Pose and smacked the sheaf of papers down with gusto.

Purr sat down beside Pose and took her hand, ready to sooth over whatever bad news was delivered about script edits and plot changes.

“It’s very good,” Lance said in as close to a pleasant manner as ever he could get. “I think we can work with this.”

“No,” Balan said, looking away with a harrumph. “I refuse! I can’t work with it!”

“Why not?!” Pose demanded, standing up and slamming her hands on the table. “Do you have any idea how much time I spe-”

He shoved a muffin in her mouth to shut her up.

“UNLESS,” he held up one finger, “we change the protagonists around a bit. I want a boy named Leo and a girl named Emma.”

Purr and Lance burst out laughing.

Pose threw part of the muffin at Balan (who ducked, laughing), and put her arms up in the air in mock anger. “There’s no pleasing you!”

“You deserved that,” Lance said. “I’d have thrown a whole basket of muffins at you. You’re lucky she just threw one.”

Purr smiled and chuckled while Balan and Pose argued (loudly) over details in the script. “It’s nice to be back to normal.” Her colorful skirt and apron contrasted loudly with Lance’s dark earth tones.

He didn’t mind. He smiled over his cup of tea. “Normal is relative, but yes, it is nice.”


End file.
